| ROMANIAN SPORTS HEROES 19/10/2009 |
| (2009-10-19) |
| Last updated: 2009-10-20 17:17 EET |
“Our Heroes”, headlines the newspaper Adevarul and then goes on to list the achievements of the Romanian delegation to the World Gymnastics Championships held in London, namely two gold medals earned by Marian Dragulescu in the floor and vault competitions, a silver on the vault from Flavius Koczi, and a bronze from Ana Porgras in the women’s in the uneven bars competition.
“Romania has made history in gymnastics”, Adevarul also writes, insisting on the vault competition, where the first two places on he podium were won by two Romanian gymnasts. The France Presse news agency notes that, with the two gold medals he won, Dragulescu was the “man of the game” in London at 29, a not so young an age in gymnastics. “Standards in gymnastics are getting higher and higher, and it is more and more difficult to win a title. So I’m very pleased”, said the former and also the current number one in world gymnastics.
Before London, Dragulescu had won 6 gold medals in world championships. Both the press and specialists agree that these year’s medals are, however, the most valuable, because they mark an extraordinary comeback. Last year, at the Olympic Games in Beijing, Dragulescu had a mediocre performance and it looked like all was over for him. For a few months afterwards, he stopped training, but only coached groups of children at the Dinamo Sports Club. Faced with health problems that threatened his career and with family problems that ended in an ugly divorce, Dragulescu was more frequently seen in tabloids than in sports shows.
And yet, Dragulescu managed to “jump miraculously over his past”, as the daily paper Evenimentul Zilei puts it, and again became a world champion after his failure at the Olympic Games and as a family man. Having recovered his strength, he doesn’t rule out the possibility to return to London in 3 years’ time at the 2012 Olympics, where, alongside a new generation of gymnasts led by the 16 year old Ana Porgras, he can help Romania stay at the top of world gymnastics.
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2025-04-03
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