It is an evening that the family is looking forward to. The election of Miss France 2022, which is held in Caen, in Normandy, on Saturday evening *, will have a very special flavor for Sanja and Hrvoje Meden. On stage, their daughter Donatella will represent Nord-Pas-de-Calais, a title acquired on October 16.
“Miss France, it was an evening that we watched as a family on TV,” says Hrvoje. We had fun noting the girls. But it wasn’t really Donatella’s thing when she was little. She preferred the Star Academy. “Because the girl first dreamed of a singer, engaged in singing lessons in Lambersart, near Lille, where she lives with her parents.
An imaginary concert tour
“At the age of 10, she had organized her own tour of imaginary concerts in a notebook,” recalls her mother, Sanja. She wondered how she would be dressed and she knew you had to be late to heat the room. “Because the open, sociable, conciliatory and smiling young girl described by her parents, but also her relatives, very early on developed a taste for the stage. “She liked to show off. She had better marks in oral than in writing at school, ”admits her father.
Apart from singing, it is the world of fashion that attracts him. Some high school teachers remember her obsession with constantly grooming her hair during class. A good student, average, she joined the modeling world at 16, under contract with a Lille agency. This did not prevent him from getting his baccalaureate and joining a fashion and luxury management school, Isefac, in Lille.
Stayed in Lille because of the war
“We knew that one day or another, she would find her happiness in this way she wanted it so much. For her, the Miss France competition is a great step, ”underlines Hrvoje. A competition where she got involved a bit by chance. “At first, she told us it wasn’t for her. And then, she was convinced to participate ”, slips her mother.
This is not the first time that fate has invited itself to the Meden table. Hrvoje and Sanja are Croats, near Rijeka, an area on the Italian border that escaped the Yugoslav war in the 1990s. However, it was this war that decided Hrvoje Meden, international water polo, to stay in Lille longer than expected.
In December 1990, he arrived at the Lille University Club (LUC) to strengthen the team. “My first motivation was to learn French because I was working in Croatia for a French company. I thought I would only stay one season. But in the summer of 1991, when I was packing my luggage, I was told that things were starting to heat up in Croatia. “
“Our daily life has changed a bit”
He nevertheless returned to finish his studies and obtain his engineering degree before joining LUC in September where he finally remained ten years: six as a player and four as a coach. His wife, Sanja, joined him in 1995 with Luana, Donatella’s older sister, now 26 years old. The family settles down permanently in Lambersart to grow. Donatella was born in September 2000, then Fioriano in 2007 and Chiara in 2010.
For the past two months, she has been facing a new notoriety, and not only in her neighborhood. “Our daily life has changed a bit. We receive a lot of mail. The postman knows us: letters with the only address Miss Nord-Pas-de-Calais, Lambersart come to us directly ”, jokes Sanja.
“She is very careful with social networks”
And that popularity will last for at least a year regardless of Saturday’s outcome. A hundred dates of representation of Miss Nord-Pas-de-Calais are already included in the 2022 agenda. With the concern, for Donatella, to preserve a private life. “She is very careful with social networks. She kept a group of 5 or 6 girlfriends at Lambersart who are in very different worlds and that suits her very well, ”notes her mother.
Because, ultimate indiscretion, the latter confesses that Donatella is already married. “She was in CM1. To illustrate a civic education program, she played the role of the bride with a classmate: a certain Julien whose mother remembered this episode and congratulated us ”. Today, this Julien draws, it seems, a certain pride in his friends.
* Broadcast on TF1 at 9:05 p.m.
