Barbara Matić wins Gold in Judo for Croatia!
Matić took down German Miriam Butkereit in the gold medal fight of the Women’s 70kg competition Wednesday night in Paris. It is Matić first Olympic medal to go along with her two world championships and one European championship. The 29 year-old Matić was born and raised in Split.
It is Croatia’s first gold medal at the 2024 Paris Olympics to go along a bronze by Miran Maričić in Shooting.
Fun fact Real Sociedad had FIVE players on the Spain Euro winning team
More than Barca, more than RM, more than anyone
Competing in Europa this yr
Anonymous approves of this move – it is VERY impressive that out of all the players they could choose to replace Merino to Arsenal – Sucic was first choice (esp. in context of Basque-first players/development a la Bilbao)
La Liga is the league (maybe Serie A too) that best suit Sucic style (based on what Anonymous has seen)
But if he does well at Sociedad – the sky is the limit
Repeat – very impressive move for Sucic – now all he has to do is work hard and force himself in the starting line-up – won’t be easy – but we’ll see what he is really made of in short order (he’s missed c.60% of pre-season w/ them, but still has time to integrate b4 La Liga starts mid-August)
RM is pretty thin on the Spanish-player front, so a moot point really. Sociedad has many more Spanish players than Barcelona does, too.
Sinkovic brothers win a gold in rowing. Amazing effort and race, we were 4th with 500 meters to go with the GB team leading by a boat length. The brothers then upped the tempo and hit the front with 30 meters to go and winning the race by 40/50 cm. Truly amazing for the 36 year olds.
The (typical) British arrogant commentary is priceless
300 m to go
“The Croatians are sprinting and coming to silver, but there is NO WAY they can pull back a FULL [boat] LENGTH in the last 300 m…”
https://x.com/Brunoblumen/status/1819333287841554649
Our HRT 2 commentators were not optimistic either with 500 m to go.
However, one of our TV commentators with 180 m to go started shouting we have them when we were half a boat length behind, and he was right.
That is absolute gold, in more ways than one. Listening to the British arrogance (yet again) bite them in the ass is beautiful. Made my day, thanks for sharing.
Thank you for posting this. I laughed so hard at the Brits on this one.
HAHAHAHA thank you for sharing that, BRILLIANT!!!! loved it.. Man that makes the win all the better !!
I loved the British commentaters letting out a long groan and then saying, “Britain finishes second!” What a great finish for the Sinkovic brothers. It is great to see the arrogant Brits put in their place.
How many medals do these guys have now?
Seems like we have the LeBron James of rowing here and nobody even knows lol.
They won three straight golds as a pair for 2016, 2020 and 2024 also got a silver in quadruple skulls in 2012. So 4 medals each.
Was anyone else at the Real Madrid gamei n Chicago yesterday… I went and first thing Modric did was run to the fans to sign croatian flags and jerseys after he was subbed off. True patriot of his country.
Vekic against Queen Wen will be a tough match up. I really hope she can snag the gold regardless, she deserves it after Wimbeldon I have been rooting for her
All our clubs made it to the next round of UEFA club competitions, however I’m not confident that any of them will get far based on last night’s performance’s.
Hajduk was terrible and lucky to get away with a 0 – 0 away draw in the Faroes.
Rakitic and Perisic came on as subs in the second half, but you can tell that they are not match fit.
They next face Slovakian opposition who were very unlucky against Trabzonspor when they lost 2 – 0 at home. The highlights that I saw of that match are not indicative of the scoreline and the Slovaks could have won that match by 2 or 3 goals.
Rijeka won 1 – 0, however they were defending desperately for most of the second half and the Romanian club also missed a penalty midway through the second half. They next face Elfsborg from Sweden and that will be tough considering that Rijeka is in pre-season while the Swedish comp is well under way.
Osijek won 1 – 0 in Estonia to win 6 – 1 on aggregate. They next face Zira from Azerbaijan stacked with foreign players including some Brazilians. The comp in
Azerbaijan also started a few months ago so Zira have big advantage when it comes to match fitness.
Matić can throw me around a mat if she likes!
Interesting, a bit of controversy around vekic
https://www.essentiallysports.com/wta-tennis-olympics-news-bad-people-no-respect-donna-vekic-dragged-into-more-controversy-as-after-coco-gauff-drama-bianca-andreescus-mother-chimes-in/
With Andreescu it’s — as my mom loves to say — “uvijek nešto.”
About five years ago Angelique Kerber called Andreescu the “biggest drama queen ever.”
Gauff is arrogant and thought she would cruise to a medal. Vekić smoked her in the second set, and Gauff blames all that on a single out of bounds call? Too bad.
Vekić was called mentally weak on here before, but it looks like it was the top seeded Gauff that needed some mental strength.
Andreescu hasn’t played well in years and wasn’t going to upset Vekić. She is overdramatic, and Vekić made the obvious observation.
This Slovak that Vekić beat today seemed like a normal girl. I think that Zheng girl is normal too, so it’s good too see these arrogant losers kicked out early.
I don’t understand what was wrong with Donna’s comments? Am I missing something?
Nothing. North Americans are just too soft and passive aggressive.
Not sure if anyone else noticed, but Croatia’s former President, Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic has been in the stands cheering on Vekic every match. Donna even commented after the difficult quarter final match, that she’ll never forget when Kolinda told her, “all of Croatia is supporting you now!” during a tough part of the match, which boosted her resolve. Apparently she works for the Olympic comity. She even handed out the medals for our women’s judo champion. Putting all politics aside, she has been representing Croatia very well…always cheering on our athletes. I’ll never forget the image of Kolinda cheering on the Vatreni in russia…standing in the pouring rain, consoling our boys after a tough loss in the final.
She’s a good politician. Smiles for the cameras and says all the right things. Always looks classy.
But it’s hard to judge politicians as they say one thing and do another. Some things are in their control, but most of the time they are just puppets who don’t have the smarts or capability to actually do anything (otherwise they probably wouldn’t be in politics in the first place).
To think that people in Croatia voted in Milanovic for President over Kolinda is beyond belief.
Kolinda is on the IOC and she presented Barbara Matic with her Gold medal the other day.
Milanović runs his mouth in a populist fashion, so a lot of center-to-right people think that’s honest and refreshing.
Leftists voted for him simply because they are socialist party loyalists, and he came from SDP (so they’d rather pick him over Kolinda).
He’s a typical politician too who just says whatever, and it’s hard to even know what ideologies he’s aligned to.
Probably just wants his government fotelja.
Also, there’s a lot of voter apathy in Croatia where the turnout is very low. Most politicians are elected with very few votes that don’t reflect anything close to the population.
I wouldn’t read too much into this.
Kolinda is a globalist serving stooge.
She comes off as pretty traditional… But as an academic with ambition, she’s required to ‘sell out’ as needed in order to continue her upward trajectory.
@Maminjo
Like you said: “But it’s hard to judge politicians as they say one thing and do another.”
She’s a hypocrite.
As an honest person I could never speak well of a hypocrite like Kolinda (what sort of person would I be to do that?), anyway she’ll get what she deserves in the end for serving mammon which is what Milanovic does also!
@Mart
“To think that people in Croatia voted in Milanovic for President over Kolinda is beyond belief.”
Funny, you believe there’s a difference between the two of them, but the reality is both are globalist serving stooges, just like Plenkovic.
The big difference is that Kolinda loves Croatia while Milanovic is Jugoslaven still crying that Yugoslavia fell apart.
Nobody’s a bigger Yugo than Josipović. Mesić and Račan were too, but Josipović visibly cringes when he has to stand through the Croatian National anthem.
@Mart
Both Kolinda and Milanovic hate the idea of an independent Croatia because they’re globalist serving stooges.
What did you think when Kolinda (who shits on the NDH but not on cetniks and communists) rolled out the red carpet for cetnik Alex Vucic, who does that serve?
Whether we like it or not Serbia is our komsija and we need to move forward and have some working relationship with them.
Kolinda tried, but unfortunately while Vucic is in power relationship between the two countries is going nowhere.
I did not have a problem with her trying to mend the relationship which included getting the information from Serbia on Croatian civilians and army personnel still missing from the war in 1990’s.
It’s pointless to bother advancing a relationship with Serbia, especially when something like 70% of their parliament is made up of parties with strong anti-Croatian sentiment.
This is what their population have voted for, so you just have to accept it and just build a nice big fence because ‘good fences make good neighbors’.
I do agree that Kolinda is far better than these other Yugophile politicians we’ve had, but she’s also got her career ambitions (which is both a strength and a weakness) which essentially requires her to play ball as needed. Not sure if she’s a hardcore globalist stooge (as suggested above) but none of us really know the inner workings of these elitist societies and their puppet politicians.
@Mart
What do you mean going nowhere, Croatia has a great relationship with cetnik Pupovac? And that’s because Croatia’s globalist serving stooges don’t care about missing Croats, this is evidenced by the fact that cetnik Pupovac, who knows where Dr. Ivan Sreter is, but doesn’t say anything, can still sit in the Croatian Sabor because the globalist serving stooges are protecting their interests.
You’d be happy to know in the prisoner exchange concerning Dr. Ivan Sreter and that Pupovac was involved with, that the Croats released the Serbian doctors but unfortunately Sreter was already dead when cetnik Pupovac was negotiating the exchange, and this cetnik Pupovac sits in the Croatian Sabor, protected their by HDZ, DP, SDP and Mozemo. It’s a disgrace what Croats endorse these days.
Yesss Vekic won her semi easily, at least a silver coming for her now, great job!
We’ll know in a few hours if Vekic will be in the Finals and getting us a medal in women’s tennis
Hopefully she can win today because Swiatek was upset today, so she would have to play her for bronze, which would be a tough ask.
Oh damn!
That makes today’s game more important.
Real chance at a gold if she wins this semi now
Looking like a reality now. Just steamrolling in this second set.
She looks bulkier, and since she’s a typical 5’11” big hitting Croat, it’s probably helped her game a lot.
Vekić with the čekić!
Something must have happened to Damir Martin today? Seems to have come in last in his heat.
Watched it, he basically could not match it with the rest. He is 36 and some of the other competitors were more than 10 years younger than him. He had a slow start and never recovered, and it was obvious from early on that he was not going to make it despite HRT 2 TV expert commentator telling’s us at the 500 meter mark that he was still a chance with 1500 m still left in the race.
Not sure if he was sick or injured ? but he came in last 100 m behind the winner.
In his interview after the event Damir announced his retirement and stated that he no longer can match it with the young and upcoming rowers. Still 2 silver and a bronze are not a bad achievement.