Todd, Phil take long road to gold medal in Prague

It’s not uncommon for Todd Rogers and Phil Dalhausser to roll through pro beach volleyball tournaments without losing a match.

This weekend they took a more circuitous route to a championship. The local team rebounded from a second-round defeat and won five elimination matches to reach the top of the podium at the $190,000 Patria Direct Open in Prague, Czech Republic.

Top-seeded Rogers-Dalhausser defeated No. 2 Alison Cerutti and Emanuel Rego of Brazil in the final, 21-15, 14-21, 15-11, in front of 5,000 fans at Stvanice Stadium.

In winning their fourth gold medal out of six tournaments on the Swatch-FIVB World Tour, the 2008 Olympic champions became the 12th team to rebound from a second-round defeat to win an international championship. They won a total of nine matches.

The fourth gold medal this year ties a season-high for the duo, and is their 12th FIVB title as a team. They’ll share the $30,000 first prize.

The manner in which they won this title had special significance for Rogers.

“Yes,” he said in an email about it being very special. “It’s always extra special to come a long way through the loser’s bracket.

“Extra painful too …” he quipped.

Rogers-Dalhausser ran their FIVB season record to 37-7 to go with their 17-0 mark on the domestic AVP Tour.

Coming off a silver medal at the FIVB Russia Grand Slam in Moscow on Monday, Rogers-Dalhausser were stretched to three games in their first match in Prague, outlasting Australians Christopher McHugh and Joshua Slack, 17-21, 23-21, 15-13. They then fell to American rivals and defending tournament champions Jake Gibb and Sean Rosenthal, knocking them into the contender’s bracket.

In their long road to the title, Rogers-Dalhausser knocked out fourth seed Adrian Gavira-Pablo Herrera of Spain and third seed Germans Julius Brink-Jonas Reckermann, and they gained revenge against Gibb-Rosenthal.

Rogers said they didn’t change anything in the second meeting against Gibb-Rosenthal.

“They played well and we were a bit ragged in the first match,” he said

The five elimination wins were the most by a gold-medal-winning team since August 2007, when Emanuel accomplished the feat with Ricardo Santos.

In the final, Rogers-Dalhausser had everything going in the first game. The Brazilians stepped up their play in Game 2, but the local duo fought back and made them sweat at the end.

“At the end of game two I thought to myself that we needed to get the momentum back and we did,” Rogers said. “We outscored them like 8-4 at the end of game two. We were down a lot worse than the final score. We carried that momentum into game three by taking a 4-0 lead and never relinquished it.”

The Brazil-U.S. matchup marked the 45th time the sport’s two powerhouses met in an FIVB men’s final, a series Brazil leads 24-21. But Dalhausser and Rogers have won their last five gold-medal matches against Brazilians.

In the bronze-medal match, Brink and Reckermann knocked off last week’s winners, No. 5 Wu Penggen and Xu Linyin of China,25-27, 21-9, 15-10.

The FIVB World Tour takes a break next week. Rogers-Dalhausser will return to the AVP Tour in Belmar Beach, N.J.