By Brian Oliver
Cansu Bektas from Turkiye won her third straight continental senior title in the first medal event of the 2025 European Championships at the Chisinau Arena – and three hours later the Olympic silver medallist Mihaela Cambei from Romania repeated the feat.
Cambei had a scare when she failed with her first two attempts, but she then made four good lifts to finish well clear of the youth world champion Lucia Gonzalez from Spain at 49kg.
Bektas and Cambei, both 22, have now been crowned European champion six times including their wins in the youth and junior ranks.
Bektas won at 45kg when she moved up from second place at halfway despite failing with two of her attempts in clean and jerk. She finished 76-90-166, which was 1kg down on her best total.
Her team-mate and room-mate Gamze Altun won clean and jerk gold and bronze on total on 68-93-161.
“We are a big weightlifting family in Turkiye, and these two girls are like my daughters,” said Talat Unlu, the Turkish Federation President. “My wife trains them and when we feed them, Cansu eats twice as much as a normal person.”
Bektas (four eggs for breakfast and then cheese and tomato toasted sandwich after weigh-in) will have to eat even more before the new weight categories come into use from June 1. The lowest body weight for women will be 48kg, and for the Olympic Games it could be as high as 53kg depending on deliberations by the IWF.
“The plan was for Cansu to compete heavier here, in the next session, but we couldn’t do it because she got injured,” said Unlu. She injured her thumb about a month ago and was unable to train properly until recently.
Altun and silver medallist Marta Garcia from Spain also missed two attempts in clean and jerk.
Garcia, up a place after finishing third in the past two European Championships, equalled her best total on 77-87-164, and Altun made 68-93-161 from her two good lifts. Iona Miron from Romania, who finished fourth, won snatch bronze on 71kg.
Gabriela Danilov from Moldova set two European youth records. The 15-year-old bettered the snatch and total records in making 69-81-150. She is due to be in action again on April 30, on day one of the World Youth and Junior Championships in Lima, Peru.
Cambei, who came so close to Olympic gold in Paris last August, recovered well after those two failures, making 85-105-190. That left her 17kg clear of 18-year-old Gonzalez, who made a career-best 77-96-173.
Radmila Zagorac from Serbia was third on 74-95-169. Zagorac moved up from sixth place in snatch, where the bronze medal went to Cambei’s team-mate Cosmina Pana on 76kg.
The European junior champion Maria Stratoudaki from Greece, youngest in the field at 16, was fourth. She would have been in the medals but for dropping her last two clean and jerk attempts at 96kg.
There were celebrations in the women’s 55kg B Group for Marlous Schuilwerve from the Netherlands, who improved her national record on total by 5kg in making 84-97-181.
Schuilwerve gained fame in 2023 when she dropped the barbell on her neck in training but survived unscathed. A video of the incident went viral on social media and attracted “about two million views” said Schuilwerve, 30.
Weightlifters have to fund themselves in the Netherlands. “It’s very expensive for us to compete here, there’s no support from the National Olympic Committee,” said Schuilwerve, who works as a corporate innovator.
“But weightlifting is growing, there are more competitions and athletes at grassroots level. We have an entirely new board at the federation, younger people in control, and we’re moving in the right direction.”
Schuilwerve, who chairs the national Athletes Commission, performed well enough in the German Bundesliga recently to qualify for this year’s World Championships at 53kg. “Now I’m going to try to bulk up to 58 and see if I can qualify at that weight too,” she said.