I was born on September 30, 1983 at Barlad, a small town from Moldova, east of Romania.
I have a brother, Sorin, who is 3 years younger than me. In Barlad, the only options for performance sports were gymnastics and athletics. Dad, who played football as a teenager, wanted that his children to follow a sport career. His memories about Nadia's 10 marks from Montreal and Moscow were still strong. Another reason for dad to encourage me to play sports, he wanted for me to get there in the top, where he didnÂ’t make it. At the age of 4 and a half, in the spring of 1988, dad took my hand and took me to the Barlad School Sports Club.
To my parents satisfaction, I wasnÂ’t scared at all by the crowd around me. I simply dived into the "sponge hole", the place where the gymnasts learn high difficulty elements. IÂ’ve became "polyvalent"! In the mornings I was going to preschool, and in the evenings I had 3 hours of practice.
I did this till the age of 10, when the fun from the beginning became as serious as it could get. The play from the "sponge hole" was just a memory. I had 2 practices per day, in the morning and in the evening, and between those two the school. I realized that in order to see my dream come true, the dream to be the best, I had to work a lot. I knew that the talent is not enough. I had to seriously sweat at vault, bars, beam or floor. The perseverance plus the talent propelled me at the age of 12 in the junior lot from Onesti. It was the first time I was away for a long time from my family. After 10 months of practice, at Onesti, the dream started to have a shape. With 10 other colleagues, I was selected fro the Olympics lot from Deva.
It was the autumn of 1997. At Deva things were very clear: I had a short vacation for Easter and for Christmas, the rest was school and 8 hors of practice per day. I had in total 50 hours of practice every week. After a half year from my arrival at Deva, I participated in the first big competition of my life - the European Junior Championships from Sankt Petersburg, Rusia 1998. From then until December 2002, when I stepped out from sports, I participated at 2 European Championships (Sankt Petersburg and Paris), 3 Word Championships (Tianjin, Gent and Debrecen) and at the Olympics Games from Sydney in 2000.
After I stepped out, I graduated the West University of Timisoara, departments of Sports, and currently I study the master courses of the University of Bucharest department of Journalism and Communications Sciences.
World Sport