Russia

Moscow was a good event. We took 2nd in a tough loss in the finals to the chinese. The weather cooperated for the most part. A little rain and a day or two of hard winds but mostly sunny and mild.
Played pool play on Thursday and Friday. Standard that we would play an American team. This time it was Casey and Brad like it was in Poland. We beat them in 2 games on Thursday for our only match of the day. On Friday we played Kazakastan. Crushed them in the first and then went 3 with them. Pretty good team considering I had never heard of or seen them before. We also played a team from Norway and beat them in 2 games to win our pool and get a bye in the first round of single elimination playoffs.
On Saturday we didn't play at all. We practiced, did some media stuff and got work done by our medical team. On Sunday we played Jake/Rosy and won in 2 games in a super windy game. Our next match we beat a team from Germany who had just beaten Matt and Nick. Kind of weird but the semis and finals were on Monday. In the semis we played Reckermann and Brink from Germany and beat them in 2 games. In the other semi the chinese beat Casey and Brad. They ended up taking a 4th place finish for Brad's best finish out here on the FIVB. In the finals the chinese played great. They took the first game and were ahead by a lot during most of it. In the second game we won by a couple of points. The third game was close the whole way. We had some chances and even one match point but couldn't get the final one we needed to win. Chinese guys are great and were generally considered to be the best team on tour to never win an event. Now they no longer have that moniker. Congrats to them.