MADRID, 14 Abr. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Spanish badminton player Carolina Marín has won her eighth consecutive European title this Saturday after beating the Scottish Kirsty Gilmour (21-11, 21-18) in the final of the European Championship, which was held in Saarbrücken (Germany). ), whom he had already defeated in the 2022 final.
The Huelva native, until now seven-time continental champion for her six golds in the European Championships (2014, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2021, 2022 and 2024) and her other gold in the European Games in Krakow last year (2023), thus raises her record and wins his third consecutive tournament in 2024 -All England, Swiss Open and European-, something that has not happened since 2018.
In the Saarlandhalle pavilion in the German city, the three-time world champion gave no options in the opening set to her great friend Gilmour, who was limited to marching in tow of the Andalusian, who finished the round taking nine of the last 12 points at stake.
Already in the second set, he gained a slight advantage after the initial exchanges that allowed him to go three points ahead at the halfway point (12-9). A 3-0 run made Gilmour take the lead in the final stretch (17-18), but Marín responded with a 4-0 win with which he took the title.
In this way, he has not fallen from the top of the continental podium since 2014, a decade of uninterrupted dominance that allows him to reach his big event of the year with all the guarantees: the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, where he will seek to emulate what he achieved in Rio 2016, when the gold was won. Only a serious knee injury prevented him from retaining the Olympic title in Tokyo 2020.
“Eight-time European champion, I am very happy to have achieved this victory. It has not been easy, especially the second set, in which I got a little nervous. The focus of attention has gone to the scoreboard and I have become tense; the task sometimes I forget. These are things to improve, I will improve them in the next games,” he said after the game.
Furthermore, Marín stressed that playing against Kirsty Gilmour “is always complicated.” “We know each other very well and we have played many times together. I am very happy to have achieved this victory, we took it home. Thank you very much to all the people who have been supporting me, to my team, to my mother, to my family and to all the people who send me a lot of encouragement from home,” he concluded.
