HCM Constanta, winner of the Romanian men’s handball championship, is in mourning after head coach Zoran Kurtes died on Friday night. The coach died in his hotel room (hotel Flora in Mamaia) despite the doctors’ one-hour effort to resuscitate him. ‘The coach died of mechanical asphyxiation from aspiration of gastric contents,’ Marius Popa, the spokesperson of the Constanta Coronary Service, stated for ‘Adevarul’ daily.
The team’s medical staff was not aware of any health problem the Serbian head trainer might have suffered from. Kurtes came to Constanta on April 29, 2008, and during the two years he spent there he won two Romanian championship titles. With Zoran at its helm the club impressed in the Champions League, reaching the competition’s last-16 stage (a first for Romanian clubs). Kurtes was survived by a wife and two children that live in Belgrade.
As a player Zoran Kurtes played 11 seasons for Jugovic Kac, then he went on to coach Jugovic Kac, Sintelon, Crvenka, Partizan Belgrade, Vojvodina Novi Sad, Pick Szeged and Al-Ahly. As a head coach he won three titles and three Serbian Cups and one title in Egypt. As an assistant instructor Kurtes won two Bronze medals with Serbia at the World Championships (in 1999 with Zoran Jivkovic as head coach and in 2001 with Branislav Pokraetz as head coach).
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