Berlin. At the second European Championship preliminary round game for the German handball players there was a whistling concert for Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Berlin.
In the 15th minute of the game it got loud in the Mercedes-Benz Arena in Berlin. At this point, the German team was leading 10-5 against the North Macedonians at the home European Championship. And yet suddenly a loud whistle concert started. Were the viewers dissatisfied? Seemingly. However, not with the performance of the athletes on the field, who started the second group game of the 2024 European Handball Championship with a convincing initial phase and ended up winning 34:25.
The reason for the whistles was an announcement by Kevin Gerwin. Normally he is the hall announcer for the Bundesliga club Rhein-Neckar-Löwen; at the home European Championships, as at the home World Cup in 2019, he acts as the hall announcer. While the game paused briefly during a timeout on the field, Gerwin was called Chancellor Olaf Scholz welcome in the hall.
+++Read the live ticker for the game here+++
Handball European Championship 2024: Handball Association regrets whistles against Scholz
After Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and North Rhine-Westphalia’s Prime Minister Hendrik Wüst (CDU) were there in Düsseldorf, Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) was among the 13,571 spectators. In contrast to the performance on the field, this announcement apparently did not excite the spectators: What followed was a seconds-long whistle concert. In the press gallery, foreign reporters looked puzzled at their German colleagues. They had never experienced anything like this before. After the players returned from the short break and continued the game, the whistles faded away and turned into loud cheering.
The German Handball Association (DHB) regrets the whistles against the Chancellor. “I’m sorry for Mr. Scholz that he was booed,” said DHB sports director Axel Kromer on Monday: “I think he still had a really great game and he presented himself as a true fan of German handball, what We were very happy.” In general, it’s “not nice at all when our guests are booed,” said Kromer. He was “glad that we scored a goal relatively quickly so that we could focus on the sport again.”