A Serbian Mom from Chicago Walked Into a Belgrade Competition. She Walked Out a Winner — and With a New Life.

Ivana Salipur Lola won the 'Never Too Late' competition in Belgrade. Then she told the audience she and her son are staying in Serbia for good.

A Serbian Mom from Chicago Walked Into a Belgrade Competition. She Walked Out a Winner — and With a New Life.

Belgrade — Ivana Salipur Lola didn't come to the "Never Too Late" competition expecting to win. She came because she loved to sing, because the opportunity was there, because life in Chicago had started to feel like it was waiting for something.

When the expert jury named her the winner for the 2025/2026 season, the look on her face said it all. She stood there, statue in hand, visibly shaken.

"I didn't expect it at all," she said, her voice carrying the kind of surprise you can't fake. "I'm literally in shock."

She meant it. The other contestants, she said, were fantastic. In her mind, she wasn't the obvious choice.

But the real moment came after the applause.

She turned to the audience, found her six-year-old son, and told everyone what the win really meant.

She's not going back to Chicago.

Lola and her son have been in Belgrade since March. They came for the competition. They stayed because something clicked. She's enrolled him in a local school that starts in September. She's already planning to be here for the first day of classes.

"I wanted my son to start school here," she said, explaining the decision with the kind of clarity that comes from someone who's thought it through. "Maybe at one point I'll just go back to America — but for now, this is home."

It's not the kind of thing you say lightly. Leaving the U.S. for Serbia, raising a child alone in a country you left years ago — that takes guts. But Lola made it sound simple. Like she'd been waiting for a sign, and this was it.

Maybe the competition's name said it all: Never Too Late.

For a Serbian-American woman in her thirties, standing on a Belgrade stage, clutching a trophy and her son's hand — it's not late at all. It might be exactly the right time.