Apeldoorn, the Netherlands, June 29, 2015 - Mexico's Bibiana Candelas entered the 2015 FIVB Beach Volleyball World Championships with new partner Claudia Rios and the pair is impressed with the level of support for Mexico in Apeldoorn.
Candelas is an experienced player who has been on the FIVB World Tour since 2007 and following the injury of former partner Martha Revuelta, she paired up with Rios.
"My partner, Rios has been training beach volleyball at university level. She won the national championships for universities in Mexico. My former partner Martha Revuelta had surgery in December and she is still in rehab. We needed to get back on the tour, so my coach invited Rios to join us in Mazatlan to train and see how we work out as a team," said Candelas.
The new Mexican pairing lost their final pool match to Cuba's Flores/Martinez in a tough group including Barbara/Agatha from Brazil and USA's Day/Kessy.
"I know I didn't have enough preparation to come here at the world championships at this level. I would have liked to have more time to prepare, but at the same time I'm happy to have the opportunity to be here and get to know the level of this tournament.
If this opportunity is still going on, I'm going to work hard to get better as a team and personally," said Rios.
"We know this is the best level we can get for beach volleyball so we're happy to be here. This is going to help us a lot to see how much we need to work on our team and what we need to get to this level. We had a really great experience here. We didn't know, but there are a lot of Mexicans living here, so it was fun to see people from Mexico cheering for us, that's awesome for us, we're really thankful and happy" said Candelas.
"I enjoyed my time here and now we know that we are not too far away from the other teams and we just need to have better preparation, and I would love back to Holland next year," said Rios.