Gold for Romania at the Canoe Sprint European Championships

The end of last week saw new performances by Romanian athletes

Florin Orban, 23.06.2025, 13:50

The Canoe Sprint European Championship, which came to a close on Sunday in Račice, in the Czech Republic, was the first major competition of the year. An under-funded Romanian federation only managed to send 5 athletes to the competition, 3 of them in canoe and two in kayaking events.

However, their quite ambitious goal of getting 2 medals has been achieved. Cătălin Chirilă, the country’s top canoeist for many years, won the gold in the 1000 m single canoe and the bronze in the 500 m race.

The final of the 1000m single canoe, an Olympic event, was quite dramatic. After Cătălin raced well and led part of the race, in the end the Olympic champion in the event, the Czech Martin Fuksa, stepped up his game and re-entered the battle for the gold. He spectacularly recovered the gap to the first place, and just barely lost the race. Cătălin Chirilă won, crossing the finish line one tenth of a second ahead of Fuksa. Moldova’s Seghei Tarnovschi came in third place.

Chirilă also brought home the second medal of the Romanian delegation, bronze in the final of the 500-meter single race, after the Czech Fuksa and Moldova’s Tarnovschi.

For Chirilă, the European title in Račice was the third of his career in the Olympic single 1000-meter event, in which the athlete born in 1998 in Tulcea was also the world champion in 2022, in Dartmouth, Canada.

At this year’s European Championships in the Czech Republic, the Romanian athletes were also close to the podium in the 500 m double canoe race. Ilie Sprîncean and Oleg Nuţă came in fourth in the final, less than half a second behind the Hungarian pair, who won bronze. The gold medals went to an Italian crew, and the silver to a Spanish one.

The other 2 Romanians in the team, Markelos Petropoulos and Roland Kupas, competed in the double kayak, but failed to reach the finals.

The next important competition will take place in Romania. In two weeks’ time, Lake Bascov, located about 100 km northwest of Bucharest, will host the European Junior and Youth Championships. The world competitions for these age groups will take place at the end of July in Portugal.

The peak of the summer competitions is the World Senior Championships, scheduled in Milan, Italy, between August 20 and 24, a competition where Cătălin Chirilă is aiming for a new champion title in the 1000 m single canoe, an event in which he has just proved his continental domination. (AMP)