
This is me: Nikola Portner

The Portner family counts five EHF Champions League titles: three for father Zlatko and now two for son Nikola. It is Portner the younger who will take us on the journey of his life, from the difficulties of being a foreign child in Switzerland in the nineties to the top of Europe. A story of values, hard work, family and, of course, handball.
THIS IS ME: Nikola Portner
My story is very much a family story.
Because this is where it all begins, where it all grows, and when - sometimes - it all ends.
Very often, when they talk to me, people put my dad in the conversation as well. And I mean, it all makes sense to me. He was the athlete, the one that put the name Portner on the handball map while I’m doing my best to keep the legacy alive.
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My own story started in France, but I don’t quite remember anything about it. Who would? After all, I left France for Bern, Switzerland, when I was only eight months old.
My father had a plan for the end of his career. After playing in Barcelona and in France, he wanted to lay down in Bern for a couple of years, before offering himself a victory lap in Yugoslavia, where it all began.
And we still all laugh about it, but the plan underwent some changes along the way.
A very large part of my family still lives in Basel to this day, and my life would probably have been completely different if we had moved to Yugoslavia.
We’ll never know.
When I was a kid, my father was my idol. And when I say idol, I mean that I was completely mesmerised by Zlatko Portner. You might know him as the three-time Champions League champion, but to me, he will always be “Daddy”.
As soon as I could walk, I would go to his training every day. And I mean, every single day.
And everything he did had a special taste, like packing up all of his stuff, moving it to the arena and unpacking it and so on… I found it absolutely amazing. Dad was going to play ball, and I wanted to do the same.
Daddy did not know quite what to do with me during training, but one of his players told him I could go and play in the storage space next to the court. So I went, I watched him and played with my little ball and my little goal and, in a way, I started training that way.
One day at training, when I was 3 or 4, I heard him yelling like never before. My dad never shouted, but this day he went, “Niko, come over here!” So I went out of the storage room, and I’m thinking that I must have done something very bad for him to be this upset. But he gives me this ball and asks me to run with it. And then to dribble all the way to the end of the court.
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Then he looks at his players and shouts that he can’t understand how they can’t do something that a four-year-old can. That was, I realised later, really humiliating for them, but I was really proud that day.
I could give you countless stories about my father and handball and so on. People always talk a lot about my father because he was the athlete and the obvious focus in the family. But my mother, Radmila, was as important to the family.
She was a real mother, like in the movies, when the dad plays with the kids and the mother is in the shadows, putting oil in the gears. With one look, you could understand what she wanted.
She was always telling my sister and I that if we listened, if we were good at school, then we could be anything we wanted. She instilled a lot of discipline in our family.
I still think of getting a tattoo of one of her mantras, that has become one of mine over time : “You live like you think”. It means that if you think you can achieve something, if you fight for it, then it’s likely you will succeed.
And my parents did fight for what they had. See, I had a very happy childhood. There was always food on the table, and nothing to really complain about.
It might sound harsh, though, but having been a “Yugo” kid in Switzerland in the nineties, I know what it means to eat sh*t. You had to be careful about what you said or how you acted all the time, you always had to prove yourself a little bit more than the others.
I experienced that with my father. He signed in Bern and he was the only professional player in the club, whereas all the other guys were amateurs. If something went wrong, it was always his fault, because he was the big star from Yugoslavia.
My parents often told me that when I would grow up, I would understand. And now, I do.
My parents’ education taught me how to survive, not to have pity for yourself. If you are not a killer in your head, then somebody will take your seat.
The education I received relied on a few things; one of them was to respect the home, and that what you would not do at home, you would not do elsewhere, either.
Home has always been a safe place for my family and me.
It was a really down-to-earth education. My parents taught me that I had to be the best because nothing would be given to me. That’s the way it is in Switzerland, if you miss your exam three times, you are out of the uni. So you have to work to achieve things.
While we are talking about family, I do have to give a big shout-out to my sister Katarina.
Even though she is eight years older than me, we have a very fusional relationship. She is my complete opposite, physically and as a person, but we have a fusional relationship. For instance, she is not interested at all in sports, she always needs to move and do things, while I am calmer, more introverted. We do balance each other perfectly.
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And while she stayed away from handball during her whole life, I soon decided to dedicate myself to the sport.
My parents never forced me to play handball and that is quite incredible, to be honest. The first subscription I took was for football, when I was five or six. I wanted to play with my friends, kick the ball around and have fun. But it lasted only two years. The winters killed it for me. I became crazy with the cold and all. The second winter playing football outside, I gave up.
Things moved almost naturally, it felt like I was pretty good between the posts and, in 2009, I signed my first professional contract with BSV Bern.
The deal was that I would be the third goalkeeper twice a week, when a goalkeeping training session was taking place, and that I would do all the rest of the week with the second team, which my dad coached.
Suddenly, at 15, I found myself among adults, and the discussions in the locker room would not be about FIFA and video games anymore, but about girls and nightclubs.
My dad let me dive into it, thinking I should earn my own place. When you are a 15-year-old goalkeeper, son of the coach, you have to prove your worth.
You might have been good in the youth categories, but this is something else. But it forged me, and the guys I played with back then remain some of my best mates in handball to this day. I became the man I am now thanks to them.
They did not quite care about handball, they were amateurs going there after a day at work. Handball for me, on the other hand, was everything in my life.
A professional career became a really serious prospect after the U19 World Championship in Argentina, where I was elected best goalkeeper. Ten years later, all of the players who were in that All-star Team are at the highest level: Jim Gottfridsson, Ferran Sole, Alex Dujshebaev, myself…
When I won the EHF Champions League with Magdeburg, we joked about it with Daniel Pettersson, as he is the same age as me. We both played that championship ten years ago, and now here we are!
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Speaking of the EHF Champions League, I won two, with two different clubs; Montpellier and Magdeburg.
It is hard to tell which one means the most to me. A lot of things were different between the two. One thing is for sure, when the referee whistles the end of the game, the feeling is the same.
I remember in 2018, I was 23 when I played my first EHF FINAL4 final with Montpellier. I was in the corridor, waiting to go onto the court, and I was thinking that it was the game of my life. Because, ever since I was a kid, my ultimate goal was to win the EHF Champions League.
Whereas last season, when we played against Kielce in the final, I knew what I had to do. In a way, I had to be one of the leaders of the team, I had to be one of the positive waves that would take the team to the title.
My role was different as well. In Montpellier, I was more of a back-up to Vincent Gérard, even though I played some really good games that season. I had a real role in winning the EHF Champions League in 2018.
In Magdeburg, things were different, when I signed, the coach told me that I knew why I was coming. He wanted me to be a model, on and off the court. He wanted me to be the guy that would help the club win some titles.
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And titles, I have won some. But the best gift that life has ever given me is my wife, Tamara.
She was there for all the trophies, all the awards. We are the kind of couple where people say that we have always been together. Handball actually united us.
It might sound a little bit forced, but my dad actually played quite a role in us getting together, while almost ruining the whole thing at the same time!
My dad coached the team that I was playing in. Tamara’s team was sometimes training after us, but we didn’t say much more than hello. But her team, which was the U15 one back then, ran the drink stand in the arena, sometimes at our games.
My dad heard she was speaking Yugoslavian with one of her friends, so he went up to Tamara at the drink stand and asked: “Who are you from?” In our culture, it meant, “who are your parents?” In every foreign community, people know each other, or at least they have heard of each other.
And so, a few weeks later, he comes up to her again, and with that wit of his, says that he wants her to meet his son. We are both awkward as hell, imagine how a 15-year-old would be in that situation, but there you go.
We don’t say much more though, as we are both very shy, me even more than her.
But that’s only the start of the story, like “the first meeting”.
One evening, the U15 coach was absent for some reason, and my dad agreed to take over. He had this kind of charm when he liked someone, so he asked Tamara if she wanted him to get her home after training.
Both our parents now knew each other, so it was ok. It turned out that Tamara’s dad was actually the Yugoslavian electrician that the whole community would call if needed.
While he gave her a ride home, my dad said to Tamara, “you know, Nikola hasn’t got any time for girls, he is really, really into handball, that’s 100% of his life, he has no time to go out.”
He almost ruined the thing!
And I did not know that until my wife-to-be and I got together. She brought that up at the first family dinner we had, and my dad kind of said that girls would have got me out of my way and would have distracted me from school.
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I said that, as a child, my dad was my idol. And he remained so until the day he went away.
Now, I don’t know what my dad would have told me after I won my second EHF Champions League. He probably would have given me a big hug. But I like to remind myself where I come from, and what my parents had to go through so I could have this career.
We all went to Serbia last summer, and my uncle and I were discussing the EHF Champions League I had just won. He then took me to the house where my dad was born, which is still in the family.
It was quite a ride, and when we arrived he just said, “See? This one is worth five Champions Leagues.”
That was quite an emotional moment for me, to get back to where it all started.
Now that I am a father, I try to give my daughter Teodora the same kind of education. To make her understand that her parents and her grandparents had to fight for what she now has, and that nothing will be given to her.
It puts everything into perspective and it also keeps our feet on the ground. I might only come from Switzerland, but by working hard and dreaming big, I managed to step up to the level of some of the best players in the world.
And that makes me immensely proud. I’m sure my family is too. And I’m sure that Dad, from wherever he is, is too.
I told you, a family story.
Nikola Portner
October 2023
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