Lana Novak is a name you all knowechoes on the dance scene of Bosnia and Herzegovina and beyond.
Born in 2007 in Zagreb, with a permanent residence in Sarajevo, Lana has been tirelessly building a career in Latin American and standard dances for years.
As a member of the BiH national team and the Sports and Dance Club “Throne”, her dedication and talent brought her remarkable results at domestic and international competitions – from national championships to the World WDSF tournaments.
During the past six years, Lana Novak achieved notable results at numerous domestic, regional and international competitions. Among her most significant successes are first place at the state championship of BiH in standard dances in 2022, two first places at the “Macedonia Open 2022” in Skopje, and high placements at competitions in Larnaca, Thessaloniki, Paris and Dublin, where she was the only representative of BiH and included in the top 10 competitors.
On the domestic stage, among other things, she won third place at the national championship in Tuzla in 2025.
In an interview for the portal Žene.ba, Lana talked about the moments when dancing stopped being a hobby and became her life’s path, challenges at international competitions, but also her passion for animals and everyday life outside the dance floor.
What does dance represent to you when you say that it is your “escape from reality”, what do you escape from, and what do you return to on the dance floor?
Novak: Considering that I’m not a particularly expressive person by nature, dancing completes that part of me – it allows me to express myself when I don’t want to express myself with words or emotions, it allows me to go to the gym at any time of the day and come back to myself.
What moment from international competitions shaped you the most as a person?
Novak: Definitely my first World Cup held in Mallorca, Spain in 2023. It was the first time in my life that I met female competitors from many countries, whose dancing level at that time could not be compared to mine. Although athletes mostly avoid talking about failures, I experienced this “failure” as a blow to reality that I needed to make a realistic comparison between the level of sports dance at which BiH is, and the level at which the rest of the world is. I can say that after that competition, I became much stricter and more strict with myself, and completely changed my approach and view towards sports.
What does your inner routine look like a few moments before you step on the podium?
Novak: My internal routine is nothing special – I think that everything before that internal routine is much more important. In the moments when I need to go on the podium, I tell myself that I know how much I worked and how much I deserved, and everything else is up to the judges to decide.
What is the most difficult part of sports dancing for you that the audience almost never thinks about?
Novak: I believe that throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina, the psychological aspect of sportsmen and women is almost completely neglected. As a result, we witness many talents giving up their desires and dreams. Success, failure, 1st or 10th place affects us all differently, and many do not know how to deal with it. I believe that sports psychologists are an indispensable part of every sports community, and our society, unfortunately, avoids them in a wide arc.
What was the greatest lesson that coach Alma Selimović taught you?
Novak: Alma is someone who – in character, is quite the opposite of me. She is very expressive and energetic at every moment, she is simply a walking positivity. Although this will sound quite classic and a sentence that we hear all the time, but she really believed in me when I didn’t myself. Simply, there were moments when I was on the verge of giving up, even though I don’t like to give up, but somehow she always managed to find a way to get me back on track even when I start to deviate slightly. I can hardly single out just one lesson that she passed on to me, because after all, she has been my coach (and coach is a further synonym for teacher) for years. She is the person with whom I have spent more time in the hall than with any friend, someone who has seen me in various editions and has never given up on me, and for that I am immensely grateful to her. She taught me that every placement is the result of hard work, not luck.
Whenever I won a medal, she would remind me that it wasn’t the shine of the gold that mattered, but the hours I put in and how much I improved as a dancer and a person. With her, I loved the process of training and improving my knowledge even more than the competition itself, because the medal is earned during training, and you just go to the competition to collect it.
Is Lana on the dance floor different from the one off it?
Novak: Completely – Lana on and off the dance floor are two incompatible people if you ask me. As I already mentioned – by nature I am not an expressive person, people would often describe me as someone who constantly wears a “Poker face” and for whom you cannot tell whether he is happy or sad at any given moment. In contrast, dance by its very nature requires extreme expression, and each of the 5 Latin American dances has its own character and requires its interpretation. By nature, I am also very persistent and stubborn, so much so that I can roughly say that I have gone through with my head where others could not with an excavator. I consider these qualities of mine very important in my sports career, since I am very ambitious, and this persistence does not allow me to ever feel tired or fed up with what I do.
A message to girls who dream dreams similar to yours, and what would you say to Bosnia and Herzegovina?
Novak: I would tell the girls that sports dancing is not only what they see in cartoons and movies. Therefore, anyone who enters this sport should be prepared to repeat one rotation hundreds of times, so that after the 250th attempt it turns out correctly. They should also be ready for sacrifices, for success, for defeat, for good and bad days – because – whoever thinks that success comes overnight, has nothing to look for in the sports industry. But if someone has a true desire and will to get into all that, I’m sure they won’t make a mistake, because I really do the most beautiful sport.
I would tell Bosnia and Herzegovina to trust and support its athletes, because we really have the potential, we just lack the resources compared to other European countries. Unfortunately, many of our athletes end their careers abruptly due to lack of financial resources, and this is perhaps the main problem of sports in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Either way, sports make us healthier and more vital, develop our cognitive abilities and motor functions, and regardless of how old you are – you are never too young or too old to take care of your health through sports.
(Vijesti.ba)
