site.btaUPDATED Austria's Coach of the Year Albena Mladenova Says She Is Happy Doing What She Knows Best

Bulgarian Albena Mladenova, winner of the Coach of the Year 2023 award in Austria, is the head coach of Austria's national synchronized swimming team, and has achieved remarkable success, reported Melange Bulgaren, a blog for Bulgarians in Austria.

Albena Mladenova was born in Sofia, where she graduated from the National Sports Academy with a swimming major. 

She has been a synchronized swimming coach for over 37 years. Before going to Vienna she had ten years of practice in Greece. Her duet earned a gold medal at the 2023 World Aquatics Championships in Fukuoka, Japan, and their sister earned two silver medals on her own. 

"I love synchronized swimming - I was a competitor, and now I'm a coach. No one in my family has been involved in sports. My mother is an artist and my father left this world too early. I do what I can do and understand best, and I am happy," Albena says. 

At the age of six, she started attending ballet lessons. After three years she gave up and started going to swimming practices. "All my friends from the neighborhood went to swimming lessons three times a week. I liked it very much and stopped ballet," she shares.

"When I saw what it was all about - dancing, ballet, music, swimming, everything - I went crazy," Albena says about her encounter with synchronised swimming. "For the first time I realised what it meant to want something really bad. I fell in love to the point of being sick. When the coach couldn't come to practice, I physically ached from that absence." In the early 1980s, she was part of Bulgaria's first synchronized swimming ensemble.

In 1989 she was offered the chance to start a synchronized swimming team at a sports school in the Lyulin neighbourhood in Sofia. She toured the schools in the area, convinced parents, recruited children and managed to create a team. Some of her girls could not swim and had to start classes from scratch, but after a few years of hard work the girls won medals at competitions. They also managed to win the Cup of Bulgaria. She says that it was when she went abroad with her team that she saw that Bulgaria had a great synchronized swimming school. “The sad thing is that in this sport the evaluations are quite subjective and often they didn't get their due points - something that made me very angry," Albena says.

She then moved to Greece where she prepared the best team in Athens. She did everything - choreography and compositions, searching and preparing music for the routines, and monitoring the physical preparation of the competitors. "I have always tried to do my best. I don't settle for a mediocre performance. Synchronized swimming entails an incredible workload - in three minutes, the girls have five or six sets underwater with breath-holding, complex leg exercises, and intense arm movements. This fast-paced change-up requires well-trained lungs, and full synchronization in the ensemble or duets is achieved with hours of repetition and working out every move," she says.

After Athens, Albena decided to go to Vienna, where she was approved after her first trial practice as a coach. Albena's girls managed to win major competitions in Austria and qualified for the 2012 London Olympics. In 2013, she was officially appointed head coach of the Austrian national synchronized swimming team.