WINNING PAIR
Southern Californians Ross, Klineman team up to take gold in beach volleyball
TOKYO >> It is a reminder to a daughter who has never needed one.
April Ross plays with a heart-shaped necklace given to her by her mother Margie, who passed away in 2001 but is still always with her.
In every serve, every dive.
All the injuries and setbacks. All the victories.
And now on top of the Olympic medal podium.
Ross and Alix Klineman captured the Olympic Games beach volleyball gold medal that had eluded Ross through three previous Olympic Games, completing for Ross a journey that began nearly three decades earlier with Margie driving April and her sister Amy around Orange County to volleyball practices and tournaments.
Ross, 39, and Klineman, 31, needed just 43 minutes to dispatch Australia’s Taliqua Clancy and Mariafe Artacho del Solar, 21-15, 21-16, at Shiokaze Park’s center court and cap a run through the Olympic tournament in which the Americans lost just a single set.
With the South Baybased pair’s victory, U.S. women have won four of the last five Olympic beach titles, Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh Jennings claiming the gold medal at the 2004, 2008 and 2012 Games.
The triumph also validated Ross’ decision to take a chance on Klineman, who switched to beach play in 2017 after being one of the last players cut from the U.S. indoor team prior to the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.
“Ever since we became partners, there’s been a big feeling of not wanting to let her down,” Klineman said. “She took a huge risk on me. I had zero (Olympic qualifying) points when I came out onto the beach, and she took me as her partner and we had to play in the country quota qualifying. She knew we might be playing in a lot of country quota and qualifiers for a long time. That’s been a huge motivating factor, just to work my hardest every day and to not let her regret her decision.”
Like Klineman, the former Mira Costa High national prep player of the year and All American at Stanford, Ross first made a name for herself indoors.
She was 10 when Margie
was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer and would be a daily inspiration for Ross during her career at Newport Harbor High, where she was also a national high school player of the year and played volleyball and basketball with future Olympic champion rower Esther Lofgren, and at USC.
Margie passed away in 2001. Her daughter went on to lead USC to consecutive NCAA titles. With Jennifer Kessy, Ross won the 2009 World championship and reached the Olympic beach final in London, losing to May-Treanor and Walsh Jennings in straight sets.
Four years later Ross was back at the Olympics, earning the bronze medal with Walsh Jennings.
The pair split in 2017 and Ross initially teamed with Lauren Fendrick before switching to Klineman later that same year.
Klineman was suspended for 13 months by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency in 2013 after testing positive for an androgenic anabolic steroid or its precursors. Imoco Volly, the professional team she played for in Italy, terminated her contract. An arbitration later confirmed the suspension but also accepted Klineman’s explanation that she had inadvertently ingested the prohibited substance from her mother’s DHEA supplements
that had been mixed with her own vitamins. She returned to the sport in June 2014.
After the disappointment, Klineman saw beach volleyball as her last chance to fulfill her childhood dream of playing in the Olympics.
“I knew her story, she was coming out to the beach to make the Olympics,” Ross said. “To take such a risk for herself, I knew that was going to be a huge motivating factor. I took all that into account, and it all held up.”
The pair made their debut in January 2018.
“It’s funny,” Ross recalled. “I was committed, this was gonna be my partner for the quad and however we started, that was just going to be how we started, we’re going to work through it. But we did win our first international tournament and it was just kind of like, ‘well okay, duh!’”
And on a hot Tokyo morning, at the end of an Olympic journey on which Ross so often found inspiration in her mother’s fight, she and Klineman had won the biggest international tournament of them all.
Later there would be a medal ceremony and Margie would be with her daughter there, too, as April placed the gold medal around her neck next to the necklace, both of them resting next to her heart.