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The soap opera regarding the Paralympics athlete Antonija Balek continues. Now the news are that the gold winner got a reward from the government despite the fact that the investigation into the allocation of money is ongoing.
According to our information, a meeting was held at the Croatian Paralympics Committee on Nov. 14 at which Balek was discussed, Balek’s attorney Zdravko Baburak told us.
- We held a meeting, but I don’t want to speak of the details. I advised Antonia the same because the media wrote a lot. Regarding the money, I am not sure, while Antonija is in shock and does not know if the money was deposited on her account – Baburak said.
According to unofficial information, the meeting lasted for more than eight hours and they made no progress. The executive committee tried to listen to Antonija, her coach Ivica Jakeljic and manager Branko Omazic.
Unfortunately, the three of them accused each other and only Antonija arrived with her solicitor. The atmosphere was heated and in the end nothing was concluded.
The question is, how did the government pay the reward because the reward is the cause of the conflict. The gold Paralympics winner accused her coach of putting people she has never seen on the rewards list. She accused the coach of threatening her life and he denied it. A big scandal broke out after her brother said that she could in fact walk and was not disabled at all. After that the government suspended the payment of rewards for the two won gold medals.
The investigation is not over, but according to sources, Antonia got the money. So what was the purpose of all that and who in the end got the money? We got no answers from the government.
Beth Haller, Ph.D., is Co-Director of the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment (www.gadim.org). A former print journalist, she is a member of the Advisory Board for the National Center on Disability and Journalism (https://ncdj.org/). Haller is Professor Emerita in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University in Maryland, USA. Haller is co-editor of the 2020 "Routledge Companion to Disability and Media" (with Gerard Goggin of University of Sydney & Katie Ellis of Curtin University, Australia). She is author of "Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media" (Advocado Press, 2010) and the author/editor of Byline of Hope: Collected Newspaper and Magazine Writing of Helen Keller (Advocado Press, 2015). She has been researching disability representation in mass media for 30+ years. She is adjunct faculty in the Disability Studies programs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of Texas-Arlington.
From Javno.com in Croatia:
