Beach volleyball: the provocateur

The beach volleyball world series tournament in Gstaad is a highlight in the calendar for many athletes. Alpine scenery, great atmosphere, at least in normal times, in the stands, cow bells ringing at more than 1000 meters above sea level. The three German national teams Laura Ludwig / Margareta Kozuch, Karla Borger / Julia Sude and Julius Thole / Clemens Wickler tried in vain until Friday to get into the Olympic form that they had been missing for a while. All were eliminated in the round of 16. Alexander Walkenhorst was also there, but drove back home with his partner Sven Winter after the group stage of the tournament, which was endowed with 300,000 dollars in prize money.

Walkenhorst, 32, the older brother of Kira, who became Olympic champion with Laura Ludwig in 2016, is also a passable beach volleyball player, he was fifth in the European Championship three times. He never managed to hit the big ball internationally, perhaps also because his angular style sometimes got in his way. For this, the 2.06-meter man has made a name for himself next to the court in the last one or two years – and incidentally divided the German beach volleyball scene.

The opinionated, sometimes provocative Walkenhorst has long criticized the German Volleyball Association (DVV) for oversleeping the beach volleyball boom after the Olympic gold medals in 2012 and 2016. Also and especially during the Corona crisis, in which sport could have been wonderfully presented and marketed in the absence of other offers. “Why? Because the structures and the type of staging and storytelling are out of date,” he writes on the homepage of his start-up. Instead of the DVV, Walkenhorst was the one who organized a tournament on German soil for the first time since the start of the pandemic in early summer 2020 – his private series, the Beach League, in which national teams also took part, caused quite a stir, especially among the younger audience.

Penisgate, abuse below the belt – Walkenhorst has done some damage. Apparently it didn’t harm him

This is also due to the fact that Walkenhorst cleverly markets himself and his start-up on the Internet. It’s called New Beach Order, based on the English post-punk band, or just to express that something new should finally emerge in his sport. The Beach League ran on the sports channel Trops4 on the Twitch streaming portal, a service provider that is very popular with young people. His podcast has a loyal following, the listeners being called a bit cult-like disciples. The line is clear anyway: with cheeky, entertaining talk and a good portion of polemics, the young audience is to be kept on the air far away from the mainstream. It has worked quite well so far, Walkenhorst has now almost achieved cult status among his disciples.

At the same time, the rifts between him and the association became deeper and deeper, and many now understood the dispute as a fight between the indoor volleyball traditionalists, for whom the DVV stood for many years, and youthful, individualistic sand athletes who did not feel they were being taken seriously. The former player representative Paul Becker wrote an open letter in April with the clear message: “Due to the developments of the last twelve months, I am afraid of a permanent split in the beach volleyball scene in Germany Association and the movement around Alexander Walkenhorst poorly presented in public – dealing with each other is embarrassing. “

Embarrassing mainly because Walkenhorst’s verbal attacks went below the belt at some point. David Klemperer, the managing director of Deutsche Volleyball Sport GmbH (DVS), which is actually supposed to market the German beach volleyball series, he described last summer as a “stupid, wretched pig”; In addition, Walkenhorst, who also appears as a commentator in his tournament series, painted a phallus on a sheet of paper in front of the camera during a game by the national duo Victoria Bieneck and Isabel Schneider. Bieneck and Schneider then left the tournament, the incident went as a penis gate through the boulevard.

Nonetheless, DVS has now given up the marketing rights to this year’s series “due to a lack of planning ability”, with the exception of Hamburg and the DM in Timmendorfer Strand. Walkenhorst has – after many discussions, especially with DVV President René Hecht – initiated a couple of tournaments, another qualification competition for Timmendorf is currently taking place in Stuttgart, initiated by the regional association there and by Constantin Adam, the manager of Borger / Sude instead of. Trops 4 broadcasts, also with the usual commentator, with whom the association could not for so long. But without which it obviously doesn’t work either. Even Walkenhorst will want to avoid a second penis gate.