Sports
Football (soccer) is the most popular recreational sport in Satu Mare. There are two major football clubs in Satu Mare: Olimpia and Someşul, with Olimpia playing in the Romanian Liga III in the 2009/2010 season and Someşul playing in the Liga IV. There are two football stadiums in Satu Mare: Stadionul Olimpia with 18,000 seats and Someşul Stadium with 3,000 seats.
Other popular recreational activities include fencing, handball, bowling, women's basketball, karate and chess.
The local women's basketball team CSM Satu Mare is one of the best in the Romanian league; it finished third in the 2008/2009 season playoffs. The team plays its home matches in the largest indoor arena in the city, the LPS Arena, which has a capacity of 400 seats.
The Cypriot professional tennis player Marcos Baghdatis was brought to Satu Mare in 1998 for a month and a half by his former coach Jean Dobrescu to train and to participate in local tennis competitions alongside his fellow Davis Cup team member, Rareş Cuzdriorean, who is also a Satu Mare native with Cypriot citizenship.
Read more about this topic: Satu Mare
Famous quotes containing the word sports:
“Guys do not have a genetic blueprint that allows them to understand or love sports.”
—Lesley Visser, U.S. sports reporter and announcer. As quoted in Sports Illustrated, p. 82 (June 17, 1991)
“Sweet smiling village, loveliest of the lawn,
Thy sports are fled and all thy charms withdrawn;
Amidst thy bowers the tyrant’s hand is seen,
And desolation saddens all thy green;
One only master grasps the whole domain,
And half a tillage stints thy smiling plain;”
—Oliver Goldsmith (1730?–1774)
“Even from their infancy we frame them to the sports of love: their instruction, behaviour, attire, grace, learning and all their words aimeth only at love, respects only affection. Their nurses and their keepers imprint no other thing in them.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)