Canoe gold for Romania
Romania's Leonid Carp and Victor Mihalachi won gold on Sunday in canoe double (C2) in the 500 metres at the Canoe Sprint European Championships in Belgrade. Last year in Plovdiv, in Bulgaria, Carp and Mihalachi finished second in this race. Their improvement from one year to another was obvious. Apart from their win in 500 metres, which is a non-Olympic event, the Romanian pair also won the silver medal in the 1,000-metre race, which is an Olympic event. The race was won by the world champions, the German crew Yul Oeltze and Peter Kretschmer, after a very fast race. The Romanian crew were less than half a second away from winning the event.
Victor Mihalachi is at the moment the most experienced rower in Romania's canoe team. He was born on 24th February 1989 in the Republic of Moldova and first competed internationally and won races as a junior for Moldova. He became world junior champion in the 500-metre race together with Hariton Ivanov in Brno, in 2007. He has since won four world and four European titles, as well as many medals in top canoe double competitions, in the 500 and 1,000-metre distance.
Leonid Carp was born in Tulcea on 31st October 1996. His first big results came in 2014 at the European Under-23 Championships held in Mantes-la-Jolie in France, namely three gold medals, in the C1, C2 and C4 events, all in the 1,000-metre distance. As a senior, until last year's silver in Plovdiv, his best results were in C4: gold at the World Championships in Milan in 2015 and silver at the European Championships in Racice that same year. In 2016, Carp was one of the Romanian rowers who tested positive for meldonium, but he wasn't penalised because the concentration found in his body was too low.
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