World gymnastics champion undergoes laser vision correction at Svjetlost Eye Clinic!

Zagreb, December 22, 2017 – Another milestone in the life of gymnast Tin Srbić! At the end of a year in which he won world gold on the horizontal bar, and after recently receiving two prestigious honors—the award for Zagreb’s Best Athlete and the Croatian Olympic Committee’s Athlete of the Year award—Tin decided to undergo laser vision correction. His vision problems never prevented him from achieving sporting success, but they did cause difficulties and discomfort, which are now a thing of the past.

“I used to wear glasses, but not while training. I couldn’t see the horizontal bar clearly, so I had to rely on my sense of where it was. When I’m training, I move two to three meters away from the bar and see it as a blur. Because of that, it seems to me as though it is twice as wide as it actually is. At competitions, I would go for days without wearing my glasses, even though that was when I needed good vision the most,” says Tin.

He often found himself unable to recognize fellow athletes from a distance in the gym—athletes he had been meeting at competitions for years—or see who was waving to him from the audience. Another problem was seeing the scoreboard. “When my score appeared on the screen after a routine, I would have to wait for my coach to tell me what I had received. Even at the World Championships, I couldn’t see whether I had scored 14.366 or 14.866, which is a huge difference. I would look at my coach, but I still couldn’t tell from his expression what the score was. Those fractions of a second felt like an eternity,” Tin adds. Following laser vision correction at Svjetlost, he will finally be able to see the horizontal bar, scoreboard and audience clearly. “With perfect vision, it will be a whole new dimension that will push me to be even better,” Tin said.

He underwent laser vision correction at Svjetlost, a leading ophthalmology institution and a pioneer in laser vision correction in Southeast Europe. The clinic has been performing the procedure since 1998, when Prof. Nikica Gabrić became the first surgeon in the region to perform laser vision correction.

“Laser vision correction is the most commonly performed elective procedure in medicine. More than 50 million people worldwide have corrected their refractive errors in this way, while at Svjetlost we have corrected the vision of more than 60,000 eyes,” says Dr. Maja Bohač, who performed the procedure using the FemtoLASIK method. “Today, with the most advanced technology, the procedure is performed entirely with lasers, using a combination of two lasers under computer control. Tin will be able to return to training and his usual activities in just two to three days,” Dr. Bohač concludes.