Sports, music and food bring people together, and at the same time they are an extremely good means of promoting a small country like Slovenia. SGBN's associate member, the Slovenian American Business Association, which operates in the USA under the name SABA, is also aware of this. Through their activities, they want to help our economy enter the American market. Recently, they made sure that by singing happy birthday to our basketball ace Luka Dončić and cooking Slovenian specialities during the game in Cleveland, OH, and attracted the huge attention of the public. Some photos are available here.

The presentation of Slovenia and thus the possibility of our economy entering a larger market such as the USA is one of the missions of the Slovenian-American Economic Association (SABA), which has been operating in Cleveland, under the leadership of Jurček Žmauc, since 2015. "Our purpose is to help the Slovenian economy and to present Slovenia to potential American investors as a good investment opportunity," he confided.

Žmauc has been in the United States since 2009, where he initially worked as consul general, and then founded the aforementioned association in 2015. Since 2018, the association has been running promotions with the help of Slovenian cuisine, which they recently did again at the basketball game between our Dončić's Dallas Mavericks and the Cleveland Cavaliers. "We brought to America one of the Slovenian chefs, Boštjan Volko, who won the European Champion Young Chef title in Paris in 2023. Besides him, the professors of the College of Hospitality and Tourism in Maribor, Mojca Polak, and Tristan Romih, who in 2022 became the European champion in restaurant service," he said about this year's event.

Not only did they cook during the game and tease the fans at the game with the smell of Slovenian specialties, they were also the ones who sang happy birthday to our basketball player before the game and gave him sparkling wine from one of the Maribor winemakers. "For his daughter Gabriela, we specially ordered a flying heart with her name," he added about the Slovenian action, which was first carried out in 2019, also at Dončić's match, and then again a year later, when Goran Dragić played against Cleveland with the Miami Heat.

Source: 24ur.com