Sports flash

Romanian football team FCSB has won the first leg of the tie against Slovak opponents Dunajska Streda, 1-nil, away from home. The fixture counts towards the European competition's third preliminary round. FCSB's Montenegrin midfielder Risto Radunović's free kick enabled Estonian center back Joonas Tamm to score an unstoppable header goal. FCSB had the upper hand throughout the game, tactically, but also in terms of physical engagement, so FCSB are the favorites to making headway into the competition. The return leg is scheduled this coming Thursday, on the National Arena in Bucharest. If they outclass Dunajska Streda, FCSB will play the winner of the fixture pitting Norway's Viking Stavanger against Sligo Rovers of the Irish Republic. FCSB's next scheduled confrontation will decide their access to the Conference League group stage.

The 2022 ICF Canoe Sprint World Championships are underway in Halifax, Canada. The Romanian delegation's main favorite to winning a medal, Cătălin Chirilă, on Wednesday qualified to the K1 500m race, having emerged as winner of the heat he was part of. Chirila clocked one minute, 50 seconds and 27 hundredths of a second, the best timing of this past Wednesday's heat races. The Romanian was two seconds better than the 1000m race Olympic champion, the Brazilian Isaquias Queiroz. We recall that in 2022, at the World Championships in Copenhagen, no Romanian individual rower or crew succeeded to reach as far as the finals. In 2019, at then the World Championships in Hungary's Szeged, Romania also had a lackluster run. Best-placed back then was the men's canoe double 1000m crew, made of Victor Mihalachi and Cătălin Chirilă who came in 5th and who also secured their qualification to the Tokyo Olympics. In the 2017 edition of the of World Championships held in Racice, the Czech Republic, Victor Mihalachi and Leonid Carp won silver in the men's canoe double 500m race.

On Wednesday, in the round of 16 as part of the WTA 250 Washington tennis tournament, an event with 215,750 USD in prize money, Simona Halep pulled out of competition. Third-seeded Halep had no choice other than retire for medical reasons, after only 66 minutes of play, when her opponent, Russia's Ana Kalinskaya, had a 7-5, 2-nil advantage. In the women's doubles, the Czech-Romanian pair made of Monica Niculescu and Lucie Hradecka advanced to the semifinals, having secured a 7-6, 3-6, 10-2 win against the all-American pair made of Makenna Jones and Sloane Stephens.(EN)

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