Swimming

Awesome! Luka Mladenovic Celebrates Bronze Medal at European Championships

Luka Mladenovic(Bild: GEPA)

Salzburg’s Luka Mladenovic won bronze in the 200-meter breaststroke at the European Championships. At the continental long-course championships in Paris, the 22-year-old touched the wall in 2:08.91 in Thursday’s final for this distance, finishing six hundredths of a second behind the OSV record he had set the night before in the semifinals. This is Mladenovic’s third international medal at the senior level; in December, he won two bronze medals at the European Short Course Championships.

However, there is still no OSV men’s European long-course champion in the longest breaststroke distance. Maxim Podoprigora also won bronze in Helsinki in 2000. Mirna Jukic became European champion in the 200-meter breaststroke both in Berlin in 2002 and in Madrid in 2004; in Eindhoven in 2008, she took silver. As early as the second of what are now 38 European Championships, held in Bologna in 1927, Hedy Bienenfeld had claimed third place. Mladenovic won Austria’s 32nd medal in the 50-meter pool—its 11th silver and 13th bronze.

Luka Mladenovic(Bild: AFP/JULIEN DE ROSA)

  The most recent red-white-red European Championship gold medals came two years ago and—after a 16-year hiatus—in Belgrade, achieved by Felix Auböck in the 400-meter freestyle and the quartet of Bernhard Reitshammer, Valentin Bayer, Simon Bucher, and Heiko Gigler in the 4 x 100-meter medley relay. For Mladenovic himself, this is his greatest success to date. In addition to his short-course successes, he reached the World Championships quarterfinals in the 50-meter breaststroke a year ago in Singapore and, about a month earlier, became a triple U23 European champion in Samorin, Slovakia. Including all his international junior medals, he has ten podium finishes.

Mononucleosis set him back during the Olympic year
Mladenovic won his first medal at the junior level in 2022. The then-18-year-old followed up his European Championship silver in the 200-meter breaststroke in Otopeni, Romania, with a full set of medals at the World Championships in Lima, including gold in the 100-meter breaststroke. Between those two events, he gained experience at the European Championships for senior swimmers in Rome, just as he had done the previous year as a 17-year-old at the European Championships in Budapest. He missed the entire first half of 2024, as well as the Paris Olympics, due to an illness—mononucleosis.

Luka Mladenovic(Bild: GEPA)

  Mladenovic is working purposefully on his career. A year ago, he moved from the training center in Salzburg and coach Plamen Ryaskov to the University of Michigan in the U.S.; even before that, he had been in contact with star coach Bob Bowman and the University of Arizona. However, Bowman moved to the University of Texas at Austin in 2024, where Mladenovic has now also secured a spot. The OSV athlete wouldn’t settle for anything less, as the training and nutrition in Ann Arbor hadn’t suited him: “I already knew back in November and December that I was going to make the switch.”

With his biggest success to date as a springboard, he’ll now kick off a full season in a few weeks in Austin at the “True Start,” after Mladenovic recently expressed his enthusiasm for his first seven weeks in his new environment. “I’m curious to see where this path leads,” he said in an interview with APA. It will be interesting to see if he develops a particular preference for a specific distance. So far, his successes have been fairly evenly distributed, but now—twelve months after the World Sprint Championships final—he’s won a medal in the longest breaststroke event.