From a professional athlete to a man who finally breathes
Today I want to share something much deeper than a simple story. I want to tell you what my life was truly like as a professional athlete and someone who wore the national jersey of two countries. Maybe right now I’m not speaking only for myself, but also for many colleagues who never had the strength to say this truth out loud.
Because when you’re a child, sport looks like pure magic. You believe the road is paved with glory, success, and the jersey in which you will one day become someone’s hero. However, life very often makes sure to show you a completely different scenario.
The painful truth
The truth is painful: most of that journey you spend unhappy. You push yourself beyond your own limits, day after day, until you no longer even know what is driving you. The audience sees you as a precisely programmed machine, something that must give more and more without question.
Behind the scenes the pressure piles up: from the stands, from the management, from the coach… but the hardest one is the one you carry within yourself.
Whoever has never been a part of that world can hardly understand what discipline, sacrifice, a silent battle with your own body and mind truly mean… Today people struggle to find half an hour for themselves for any kind of physical activity, for their own health.
While a professional athlete completes most training sessions without a single spark of conscious will, yet still finishes them, giving more than what realistically exists. This goes beyond discipline. It is a state of mind that you can’t explain, not even to yourself. When you step on the court, everything is forgotten, but…
Summer “break”
When you finally reach the short summer break, your mind still stays trapped in the upcoming preparations. You know you must come back more prepared, faster, stronger, because in that world you are worth as much as your last training session, your last game.
If the coach doesn’t like you from the start, your season becomes a stay in an invisible prison. The contract keeps you, and pride forces you to stay silent. For years you live in an atmosphere that slowly eats you from the inside: bad vibrations, negative energy, toxic expectations…
From that injuries are born, both physical and mental. You treat them on the go, because there is no time for weakness. You hear sentences that in the normal world would be unimaginable “It’s nothing. Bite down and push through. When I played, that was normal…”
What was all this really for?
And you know inside that once again you have sold a piece of your own health. The number of surgeries keeps growing, but it’s nothing…
The worst part is when you realize that when you are at your lowest, the system turns its back. A replacement appears in a minute, and you remain alone with the injury and the silence. At the same time, you are expected to return in record time, to be a “beast” again, to fulfill the ambitions of others, even if you’re breaking inside.
Season after season, year after year, the moment comes when you realize you’ve pushed your health to the edge of no return.
Then the question slips out on its own: For what? For a salary and money that can never be worth your health? For the short “man, what a goal you scored,” which instantly turns into insults if you have a bad day?
Sport taught me not to complain.
It taught me to find light even when there is almost none. But it also taught me the hardest lessons: how cruel those who pat you on the shoulder can be, how fleeting everything is, and how little you are worth once you stop delivering results…
And worst of all, your performance becomes tied to what kind of person you are. So, if you play well, everyone loves you, they stand by you, and you are a good person. Otherwise, if things don’t go your way, you are condemned to contempt, rejection, and additional trampling.
Very few ever get out of that tunnel…
This is the reality of sport in the Balkans, but also a mirror of a much broader picture. Because what happens in locker rooms, courts and clubs happens in offices, factories, hospitals, schools… The same patterns: pressure instead of support, criticism instead of understanding, replaceability instead of humanity. The same battles, the same fears, the same silent endurance.
Sport is only the stage, life is the theatre.
And we, all of us, are trying to win our matches in a world that often doesn’t cheer for us…
Yet, a higher force always finds a path for those who truly deserve it. It led me to Spain. To magical Ibiza. And there my view of people and life completely changed.
I met kindness and brightness I didn’t believe could exist. People who see you first as a human being, and only then as an athlete. For months I was in shock that such sincerity still lives somewhere in the world. It took time for me to relax, to drop the shield and armor I had been carrying… There I learned perhaps the most important life skill of all: HOW TO FORGIVE.
Everyone. But especially myself.
Time has changed
Today, thanks to working on myself, I live a peace, calmness, and fulfillment I never had before. While I said NO to handball, I said the greatest possible YES to life. When you know you have given more than your maximum, your conscience is crystal clear.
From that contradiction, from pain and gratitude, from falls and breakthroughs, my new mission was born. To transform my experience, every lesson, every scar into something that will serve as a guiding light for others. To help them improve their body, their mind, their everyday life.
That is why I combined years of practice in sport with the best international certifications for a personal coach and mentor, and created my Ragukai system. A method that carries everything I lived, learned, and survived.
Today, I live my mission:
To change lives for the better.
To be the support I never had.
To lead by my own example.
To help anyone who is ready to take that first, hardest step.
This is the first text in a series, but definitely not the last. I am young, but I carry experience that is rarely gained through years, but through life. Those who truly have something to say must speak clearly and loudly.
Maybe someone’s spoken truth becomes the spark that brings change to someone else. In a time when most people live in daily grayness, every spark is precious.
