Congratulations to Mirnesa and Mirneta Becirovic, IWGA Athletes of the Month for November 2016. These identical twins from Austria(24) won the gold medal at the Ju-Jitsu World Championships in Wroclaw (Pol), host city of The World Games 2017. It was their third consecutive world title. Mirnesa and Mirneta Becirovic perform in the Duo-Women discipline.
Winning the title at the event in Poland this November ensured that they will be able to defend their World Games title from 2013 Cali/Colombia. Mirnesa and Mirneta Becirovic are qualified for TWG 2017 (20-30 July) in Wroclaw.
At the end of the event in Poland, they were honoured as the outstanding team of this year’s World Championships. After achieving their fifth World title overall, they posted on Facebook: “Months full of hard training including sweat, pain and emotional moments were rewarded with the Austrian anthem!”
Mirnesa and Mirneta Becirovic live in a small town close to Vienna called Pressbaum. They were born in Bosnia and arrived in Austria with their parents and older brother at the age of eight months during the civil war in former Yugoslavia. The twins started Ju-Jitsu when they were 6, and are now black belts (2nd Dan). After graduating from commercial college in 2011, they were given the opportunity to enter into a special contract as police officers with the Federal Ministry of Internal Affairs.
This means that they are elite athletes of the Austrian police. Alongside their professional duties as police officers they are allowed a high contingent of hours for sports training during working hours, competitions, training camps and so on. After winning the Austrian Championships in October the Minister of Sport, Hans-Peter Dokozil, awarded Mirnesa and Mirneta Becirovic the “Goldenes Ehrenzeichen”, an important decoration for athletes in Austria.
Finally some trivia: one of their sports advisers is the stuntman and Hollywood actor Alain Moussi.
