By Brian Oliver
Emily Campbell won her fifth straight continental title and Varazdat Lalayan claimed his second as the super-heavyweights brought the 2025 European Championships to a close in Chisinau, Moldova. Neither Campbell nor Lalayan started until everybody else had finished, and both won by more than 30kg. Lalayan declined his final two attempts after opening on 240kg in clean and jerk.
Lalayan made 210-240-450 from his three good lifts. Mart Seim from Estonia was second at the age of 34, making his best total since 2018 on 180-235-415. Bohdan Hoza from Ukraine was third on 190-216-406 and fourth-placed Bakari Turmanidze from Georgia was the only other one of 16 lifters to break the 400kg barrier, making 183-219-402. Turmanidze won a bronze in snatch and Hoza’s team-mate Vladyslav Prylypko took clean and jerk bronze on 220kg.
Lalayan has now won five of his past six competitions – two European Championships, the 2024 World Championships, a Grand Prix and a World Cup. The only time he was beaten was at the Paris Olympics by Lasha Talakhadze, who is taking a break from the platform. Campbell, the oldest of 10 women in the field, will be 31 next month. She will target the World Championships in Norway in October and next year’s Commonwealth Games before deciding whether to aim for a third Olympic Games in Los Angeles in 2028. She won silver in Tokyo and bronze in Paris.
After making all six attempts, Campbell finished on 120-161-281, which left her 39kg ahead of Kiara Klug, the 22-year-old silver medallist from Germany. Klug weighed in at 92.9kg, nearly 30kg lighter than Campbell, and also made six from six. Her only previous result on the international database was third place at the 2023 European Juniors, where she totalled 211 in the 87kg category.
Valentyna Kisil was third on 110-127-237. Her Ukraine team-mate Krystyna Borodina won silver in clean and jerk on 132kg and finished fourth. The age range among the men was 20 years. Kamil Kucera had already competed at two World Junior Championships before the youngest super-heavyweight in Chisinau, Szymon Ziolkowski from Poland, was born.
Kucera is still going strong at 40 and is planning to try for a place at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games. He made it to Paris last year but was still recovering from life-saving surgery and was unable to lift properly. “My knees hurt, my shoulders, my back, everything. But I am still strong and I feel motivated. I want another chance for the Olympics,” he said in the training hall at the weekend.
“I started in 1997 but I stopped from 2006 until 2012 for personal and financial reasons, I tried eight jobs at that time when there was not so much support (from state funding) for weightlifting.” So, did he feel he had six years in the bank? “Yes, exactly.”
Kucera did not know he had a place in Paris until mid-June, when two athletes from Belarus were ruled ineligible. He was still recovering from surgery but his federation agreed with him that he should still go to Paris. In the weeks after the World Cup in Phuket, Thailand last April, Kucera had been diagnosed with a kidney stone but there were complications. “I was in the right place at the right time, at hospital, and the doctor saved my life,” Kucera said. “I was told I was ten minutes from death.
“Because of internal stitches I had to rest and could not return to the gym until much later. I had only one training session in Prague before the Olympics, and two in Paris. That was it. I couldn’t use my core at all, Kucera went out on the Paris platform alone, making 110-140-250 from four attempts and declining two.
Today he was fitter, benefiting from six training sessions every week. He made 166-211-377 in eighth place. The top Robi points scorers were Karlos Nasar in the men and Solfrid Koanda in the women. Yauheni Tsikhantsou and Eyglo Sturludottir were second best.