Slovenian kayaker on calm waters Anja Apollonio won a bronze medal at the European Championships in Montemor-o-Velho, Portugal. In the final A of the sprint race at 200 meters, only Danes qualified ahead of the 33-year-old woman from Koper. Frederikke Moercke and Hungarian Anna Lucz.
The Koprčanka won her seventh medal at the continental competitions, her fourth in the individual competition. In Munich 2022 and Recice 2025, she won a silver medal in this discipline, and in Munich 2022 she also won a bronze medal in the K-1 discipline at 500 meters. In his collection, he has three more medals in a pair with Špelo Ponomarenko Janić. They won gold in Poznan 2021, a silver medal in Szeged 2024 in the 200-meter race, and in Plovdiv they also won silver in the 500-meter race.
“Obviously I’m improving a little bit from game to game. Something didn’t feel right during the warm-up, I can feel when everything is good and when it’s not. When I crashed into the starting block at the start, I thought that everything was lost, but I still kept to the finish line. In fact, I thought I was fourth all the time, I was sure that the Ukrainian woman overtook me by one place on the first track. So I already put on a ‘poker’ face and when they congratulated me, at first I didn’t even understand why. I am very satisfied,” Apollonio said after winning a new medal at the European Championship.
This is how she looked forward to silver last year in Milan. PHOTO: KZS
The twenty-five-year-old peace woman from Hamlet’s land set a time of 39.345 seconds in today’s final. The second-placed Hungarian was 0.984 seconds behind, and the third-placed Slovenian was 1.089 seconds behind. Apollonio qualified directly for the A final at Friday’s test after finishing second in her preliminary group. Only Moercke was ahead of her.
Koprčanka was the only Slovenian representative at today’s trials in Portugal.
Sunday will be the last day of the continental competition. In the final A in the K-2 discipline at 500 meters, the Slovenian athlete Apollonio will compete for the medal.Mia Bear. The latter will also compete in the individual race in the final B at 500 meters. They will row in the final B in K-2 at 500 m Matevž Manfreda and Anze Piconbefore Jošt Zakrajšek and the test in the K-1 discipline is over 5 km.
