Stars of past and present meet in Prague

The handball stars of the past and the present had an unusual June date in Prague this week and many big names of the European and world courts made a trip to the Czech capital to celebrate on one big occasion several anniversaries of the Czech and Slovak handball.

The 2017 year marks 70 years of the first field handball match played in the former Czechoslovakia. Already ten years after the men of Dukla Prague claimed the premiere edition of the European Champions Club, a forerunner of the EHF Champions League, while the women’s team of Czechoslovakia won the first edition of the IHF World Championship in Belgrade.

In 1967 the men’s team emulated that success at the World Championship in Sweden, while 45 years ago the combined team of these two nations won silver medals at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich.

The colourful three-day event in Prague included a handball marathon, a wheelchair handball tournament or domestic youth championship finals. The celebrities of the Czech sport and social life took part at the handball game and during the whole event a good cause was supported as 200.000 Czech crowns (7,600 EUR) have been raised to support a bone marrow transplantation foundation.

On the fringes of the event, the EHF President Michael Wiederer also handed over the Best left back of the Champions League’s first 20 years to the Czech stalwart of THW Kiel and FC Barcelona Filip Jicha.

The event culminated on Wednesday in the two exhibition games between the joint Czech and Slovak selections and the World Stars teams. While the hosting women’s team drew against a squad with the likes of Clara Woltering, Katarina Bulatovic or Mayssa Pessoa, the Czecho-Slovak men’s team managed to snatch a narrow victory against a star-studded line-up coached by two coaching masterminds Alfred Gislason and Claude Onesta. As results were far from being the main priority on the court, the stars on both ends could fully focus on entertaining the crowds.

The names of players who took part in the game speak volumes: Jackson Richardson, Henning Fritz, Daniel Stephan, Slawomir Szmal, Valero Rivera, Momir Ilic, Laszlo Nagy, Kim Andersson, Daniel Narcisse, Thierry Omeyer, Hans Lindberg, Dominik Klein, Iker Romero, Bertrand Gille, Christian Sprenger.