A look back at the achievements of Romanian handball teams in European competitions.
The Romanian women's handball team CSM Bucharest won the European Champions League title last Sunday. That is no breaking news, but it bears repating, because no other Romanian women's handball team has had such success in the last 50 years.The victory of CSM Bucharest is an opportunity for us to recall the successes scored by the Romanian women's handball clubs over time.
Another Bucharest team, Stiinta, won the first European Champions Cup in 1961. They first beat Spartak Subotica of Yougoslavia and Jalghiris Kaunas of the USSR, and went on to defeat the Czechoslovak team Dynamo Prague in the final.
Three years later, the European Champions Cup returned to Bucharest, this time being won by Rapid. The team defeated Spartak Subotica in the first leg, the East-German team Fortschritt Weissenfels in the quarter-finals and the Hungarian team Budapesti Spartacus in the semifinals. Rapid Bucharest beat the Danish team Helsingor 14-13 in the final held in Bratislava, in the then Czechoslovakia.
Three other Romanian teams have been in the final of the European Champions League since then: Universitatea Timisoara, who were defeated by Spartak Kiev of the USSR in 1973; Stiinta Bacau, who lost to Spartak Kiev in 1986; and Oltchim Ramnicu Valcea, who were defeated by the Danish team Viborg in 2010.
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