The duo come into the event having won a bronze medal at the Beach Volleyball Major Series event in Swiss village Gstaad, where the men’s competition concluded yesterday.

They also finished second at the Fort Lauderdale Major Series event in March but struggled prior to their appearance in Gstaad, with ninth place-finishes in Ostrava and Warsaw.  

Last year’s silver medallists Aleksandrs Samoilovs and Jānis Šmēdiņš of Latvia have been improving from tournament to tournament and triumphed at the four-star event in Espinho earlier this month.  

They will be trying to secure their second European crown after winning gold in 2015 in Klagenfurt in Austria, to go with the silver medals they claimed from the 2013, 2014 and 2017 editions.

Smedins also has a bronze medal to his name, a feat he achieved in 2010 with former partner Mārtiņš Pļaviņš.

Home favourites and Olympic bronze medallists Alexander Brouwer and Robert Meeuwsen are strong candidates for a podium finish as well.

In 2017, they won their first European medal when clinching bronze in Jūrmala in Latvia.

Apart from the 2017 medallists, there are several other teams to watch closely, including Norway’s rising stars Anders Berntsen Mol and Christian Sandlie Sørum.

Mol and Sørum, who last year lost in the quarter-finals to Nicolai and Lupo, prevailed at the Gstaad Major Series event.

Last year’s women's champions Nadja Glenzke and Julia Grossner of Germany will not defend their title as the former surprisingly retired from competitive sport earlier this year at the age of 22. 

There are plenty of other elite teams that will be chasing the coveted crown, however, with 2017 silver medallists Kristýna Kolocová and Michala Kvapilová of Czech Republic trying to go one better. 

Their 2018 season started in the best possible way as they claimed gold at the European Masters in Pelhřimov in January, but they have struggled somewhat lately, with 17th and 25th-place finishes at the events they contested in Ostrava and Warsaw respectively.

Compatriots Barbora Hermannová and Markéta Sluková, on the other hand, seem to have been hitting their top form - especially following the gold-medal winning performance in Ostrava last month. 

Hermannová and Sluková are hoping to improve on the silver medal they won in Biel/Bienne in 2016, when they lost the final to Germany’s Laura Ludwig and Kira Walkenhorst, the reigning Olympic and world champions. 

With Ludwig having recently become a mother and Walkenhorst recovering from surgery, Chantal Laboureur and Julia Sude will be carrying Germany’s hopes of success in The Netherlands. 

They finished third last year in Jūrmala and this season they have made it to the podium twice with bronze at Huntington Beach and silver in Warsaw.

The Beach Volleyball European Championships will take place across four cities; The Hague, Apeldoorn, Rotterdam and Utrecht.

Home favourites Dirk Boehlé and Steven van de Velde will open the event this evening when playing Italy's Marco Caminati and Enrico Rossi, shortly after the Opening Ceremony. 

The men’s competition will then resume tomorrow before the women contest their first pool matches on Tuesday (July 17).