When it comes to Romanian gymnastics everybody dreams about gold medals. “Responsible” for that is the heritage of Nadia Comaneci, Daniela Silivas, Ecaterina Szabo, Lavinia Milosovici and many many other great champions, who, for 32 years, have gotten Romania on the podium at all big competitions. With such a tradition of course that the expectations are very high, but we forget, many times, that it is not us who is entitled to wish this, but the gymnasts, who sacrifice their childhood, their life, the relation with their families, their spare time, in order to train, for many many hours, and present one 1.5 minute exercise at the Olympic Games or at the World Championships.

The way to the golden medal is not easy at all, as many might imagine. The gymnasts risk a lot, play with their health, and sometimes have to go over their limits in order to win the most valuable medal. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they don’t….but who are we to judge them so harshly?

Unfortunately the Romanians remember gymnastics only when it is a medal at stake (won or lost), only when the gymnast presents that 1.5 minute exercise for which he/she has worked for years. They only know that “we are good in gymnastics” and that any mistake is unforgivable…and that is because, in Romania, the information about this very difficult sport is almost non-existent in the TV journals. But gymnastics exists 365 days per year, it never stops, because, in this sport more than in others, the time is very precious, any lost day meaning more recuperation work for the gymnast. Few people know that, after an injury and a few weeks without training the recuperation is very very difficult, that the effort made at the National Center is huge just to compensate for the inappropriate training of the gymnasts in their hometown clubs, where the conditions can be, sometimes, very poor; or that Romania has only a very few seniors to choose from in order to fight with the most powerful countries in this sport…

An idea about the life of the gymnasts in the national training center in Deva we can make from the documentary made by the Romanian TV channel Antena 3. This film was prepared after the European Championships in Clermont-Ferrand (2008) and presented to the audience just before the start of the Olympic Games in Beijing. We would like to thank Antena 3 for this initiative, the only one of this kind, as far as we know. We would like to see this type of documentaries a lot more often because these girls need our support, they need to know that people care about them and that their hard work is not for nothing, even if they don’t win the precious medals.

Hereby the links to this documentary (in Romanian):
part1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7 and part 8.
Enjoy it and please let us know what you think!!