Category: Romania

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Doping Romania WAG

Doping in Romanian Gymnastics: Maria Olaru’s Account

“In gymnastics, doping can’t help you. That’s precisely why I don’t understand why anti-doping controls are carried out so often.”

When Romanian coach Nicolae Forminte made that claim to Pro Sport in August 2008, he was articulating a belief long embedded in the sport’s self-image: gymnastics and doping are incongruous. The implication was clear. If performance-enhancing drugs offer no advantage, then the problem scarcely exists.

And yet, it did.

Doping was not foreign to the Romanian gymnastics program; it was part of its history. In Degrees of Difficulty, historian Georgia Cervin has argued that doping in Romania was more systematic “at least until the year 2000, when Răducan was stripped of her gold medal in the all-around after the team doctor gave her, and allegedly the entire team, pseudoephedrine.” The episode, she writes, reveals that “over the last four decades, at least, coaches, officials, and even medical staff have conspired to break the rules in order to win medals, thereby jeopardizing gymnasts’ careers and health.”

Pseudoephedrine was not the only substance circulating within the system. In her autobiography, Prețul aurului. Sinceritate incomodă (The Price of Gold. Uncomfortable Honesty), Maria Olaru describes the pressures placed on gymnasts to maintain competition weight. The options, she suggests, were stark: develop bulimia, or be “forced” to take furosemide—a banned diuretic that can also be used to mask other drugs, including anabolic steroids.

Simona Amânar, Andreea Răducan, and Maria Olaru, 2000
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2000 Doping Olympics Romania WAG

Andreea Răducan: The Only One Who Tested Positive

The women’s all-around final at the Sydney Olympics began at 7:00 p.m. on Thursday, September 21, 2000. Maria Olaru, competing for Romania alongside Simona Amânar and Andreea Răducan, had made a prediction before the competition started. She told her coaches that all three Romanians would make the podium. When Octavian Belu, Romania’s head coach, relayed this to reporters afterward, he added with affectionate exasperation: “She has the instincts of a witch. She scares me. From now on, anyone who wants to win the lottery should ask her what numbers will come up.”

By the end of the night, the witch had been proven right. Răducan stood atop the podium with a score of 38.893, flanked by Amânar (38.642) and Olaru (38.581). It was the first time since the 1960 Rome Olympics that a single nation had swept all three medals in the women’s all-around at the Games.

What Olaru could not predict—what no one in the SuperDome that night could have imagined—was what followed.

Simona Amânar, Andreea Răducan, and Maria Olaru, 2000 Olympics
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1984 Perfect 10 Romania WAG

1984: Ecaterina Szabó’s Perfect 40s

In the summer of 1984, Ecaterina Szabó achieved something that, even in an era of liberal scoring, stood out as exceptional: she recorded two perfect all-around totals of 40.00, months apart and in markedly different competitive settings. The first came in June, at a dual meet against Czechoslovakia in Prague, where Szabó received a 10.00 on all four of her optional routines—a feat that FIG officials publicly acknowledged as unprecedented. The second followed in August at the “40th Anniversary Cup” in Buzău, a domestic competition staged in the afterglow of the Los Angeles Olympics, where she again scored a perfect 40.00.

Here are a few newspaper articles about those competitions.

Ecaterina Szabo, Romania, gold medallist (Photo by S&G/PA Images via Getty Images)
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Doping Interviews & Profiles Romania WAG

2002: Rodica Dunca – “At Deva, It Was a Concentration Camp”

In October 2002, more than two decades after Romania’s women’s gymnastics team won gold in Fort Worth, Rodica Dunca broke a long silence. Speaking to Pro Sport, the former international gymnast described daily life inside the Deva training camp not as a center of excellence, but as a place of hunger, surveillance, fear, and physical coercion. Her testimony names teammates whose faces became global symbols of grace—Nadia Comăneci, Melitta Rühn, Emilia Eberle (Trudi Kollar), Dumitrița Turner, Teodora Ungureanu—and places their medals alongside scenes of beatings, escapes intercepted by the Securitate, and bodies pushed beyond collapse. What Dunca recounts is not a single shocking incident, but a system: one in which control over food, water, movement, pain, and obedience defined her adolescence.

Like Eberhard Gienger, Dunca recalls being given an obscene number of pills and injections; unlike Gienger—who admitted to returning many of them to the pharmacy—she was compelled to take everything she was given. Dunca does not identify the substances involved, making it impossible to determine whether any appeared on the IOC’s banned list. She was competing, moreover, in an era when the FIG did not conduct systematic testing, and when the reliability of the drug controls at the 1980 Olympics remains questionable at best. Even had prohibited substances been involved, a positive test would have been unlikely.

Yet the absence of a positive test is not the absence of a problem. Dunca’s account instead directs attention to the medical regime under which Romanian gymnasts trained and competed. The forced ingestion of dozens of unidentified tablets each day, the routine administration of injections associated with prolonged amenorrhea, and the later emergence of drug dependence—all point to a system of non-therapeutic, coercive medical management that regulated young athletes’ bodies for performance, not health.

Set against official narratives of discipline, sacrifice, and triumph—most famously associated with Béla Károlyi—Dunca’s interview exposes the cost hidden behind the perfect smiles and historic scores. It is a reminder that Romania’s golden era in women’s gymnastics was built not only on innovation and talent, but also on practices that blurred the line between training and punishment, medicine and control, excellence and abuse.

Below, you’ll find a translation of ProSport‘s interview with Dunca from October 26, 2002.

Rodica Dunca (the second gymnast from the left), 1980 Olympics
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Age Romania WAG

Vaulting Ahead of Time: Eugenia Golea and the Years Romania Erased

For gymnasts whose ages have been falsified, a single birthdate is never enough. Their careers must be read against two calendars: the date on which they were actually born, and the date under which they were permitted to compete. Only by holding those two timelines together can we understand not just that an age was altered, but why.

Take Eugenia Golea. She was born in 1971, yet her first senior World Championship medals came in 1985. To be fifteen at those championships, she would have needed a 1970 birth year. But that was not the date under which she competed. Instead, Golea was officially registered as having been born in 1969, making her eligible for the Los Angeles Games. However, for Golea, things never quite came together in 1984.

Eugenia Golea, 1988 Olympics

Photo credit: Norbert Schmidt
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Age Romania WAG

The Forgotten Confession of Celestina Popa

In December 1990, as Romania struggled to redefine itself after the fall of communism, Celestina Popa said something that should have forced a reckoning in international gymnastics. Speaking to Dutch journalist Hans van Wissen for De Volkskrant, she acknowledged openly that the Romanian federation had falsified her age.

“Sometimes people on the street asked me how old I was,” Popa said. “I didn’t know what to tell them: my real age or the age the federation gave me. Officially, I was one year too young to compete at the 1985 World Championships.”

It was not a vague admission or a rumor repeated secondhand. Popa, herself, was correcting the historical record. Her confession came on the heels of Ecaterina Szabó’s own admission and Aurelia Dobre’s divulgence of Daniela Silivaș’s age falsification, as well.

Together, their statements represented a breach in the Eastern Bloc’s code of silence: athletes speaking openly, shortly after their careers were over, about a system built on falsification and obedience.

Yet nothing changed.

Celestina Popa, 1988
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Age Romania WAG

Cristina Elena Grigoraș: The 12-Year-Old Olympic Silver Medalist

When Béla Károlyi defected to the United States in 1981, he carried with him not only his reputation as Nadia Comăneci’s coach but also Romania’s secrets. Speaking to the New York Times in December 1981, after an age scandal erupted at the World Championships in Moscow, Károlyi made a stunning allegation: three members of the Romanian women’s team competed in Moscow despite failing to meet the 15-and-over age requirement. They were Lavinia Agache, who he said was 13 years old; Christina Elena Grigoraș, also 13; and Mihaela Stănuleț, 14.

It would have been easy to dismiss these claims as the bitter accusations of a defector. But Károlyi was telling the truth. Subsequent research has confirmed that Mihaela Stănuleț was born in 1967, making her 14 at the 1981 World Championships. Lavinia Agache was born in 1968 and was indeed 13 years old. And, as we’ll see in the archival record below, Cristina Elena Grigoraș, the young star who had dazzled audiences with her European Championship performance earlier that year, was also born in 1968—not 1966, as her official documents claimed.

That means she was only twelve years old when she competed at the 1980 Moscow Olympics, well below the minimum age requirement of fourteen. Romania’s silver-medal team performance thus relied, in part, on the participation of an underage athlete competing under an incorrect birthdate.

The Romanian team at the 1980 Olympics, Moscow
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1981 Romania USA WAG

The Szabó Substitution: How Agache Competed as Szabó in Los Angeles

In late January 1981, a Romanian gymnast, who was competing at the International Gymnastics Classic in Los Angeles, was greeted with something unusual: birthday cake. During a dinner with the delegations, someone mentioned the petite Romanian had a birthday, and the Americans—ever genial hosts—sang “Happy Birthday, Ecaterina.” She smiled. She stood. She accepted the applause.

There was only one problem. The gymnast wasn’t Ecaterina Szabó. It was Lavinia Agache.

What happened in California that weekend became known as the “Szabó Substitution”—a scandal that would expose gaps in international athletic oversight, raise questions about Cold War-era sports diplomacy, and leave a young gymnast’s achievements erased from the record. The story unfolds differently depending on whose version you follow, but the timeline itself reveals how information traveled, how institutions reacted, and what remained unresolved.

Ecaterina Szabó on the left, Lavinia Agache on the right
USGF News, no. 2, 1981
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2001 Age Interviews & Profiles Romania WAG

2001: A Profile of Lavinia Agache – “Time on Her Side”

Among the brightest stars of Romanian gymnastics in the early 1980s, Lavinia Agache carved out a remarkable career despite controversies and heartbreak. Born February 11, 1968, in Onești—the same hospital that welcomed Nadia Comăneci into the world—Agache emerged as one of the era’s most decorated gymnasts, accumulating ten medals at major international competitions. Yet her path to prominence was shadowed from the start: Romanian officials altered her age, listing her birth year as 1966 instead of 1968. This deception allowed the thirteen-year-old Agache to compete illegally at the 1981 World Championships in Moscow, where she placed seventh all-around—two years before she would have been eligible under FIG’s minimum age of fifteen.

By 1983, Agache had established herself as a force in the sport, winning four medals at the European Championships in Gothenburg (including gold on balance beam and silver in the all-around) and three more at the World Championships in Budapest. She entered the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics as a legitimate contender for all-around gold, having finished third at the 1982 World Cup and consistently challenging teammate Ecaterina Szabó throughout their years training together at the Romanian national center in Deva.

Lavinia Agache’s gold-medal routine in 1983

First after compulsories, Agache’s Olympic dream disintegrated when a team doctor gave her a pill to combat jetlag. The next day, disoriented and lethargic, she fell four times during the optional round. The medication was legal, but its effects were devastating: Agache failed to qualify for the all-around final, watching from the sidelines as Szabó battled Mary Lou Retton for gold. What happened to Agache in Los Angeles—and the painful parallel she would later draw to Andreea Răducan’s 2000 Olympic ordeal, when a team doctor’s prescription cost the Romanian gymnast her all-around gold medal—forms a cautionary tale about the precarious intersection of medicine and athletic performance in elite gymnastics.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Here’s International Gymnast‘s piece on Agache from 2001, published before the age falsification scandal erupted in Romania in 2002.

Lavinia Agache, 1984
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2003 Age Interviews & Profiles Romania WAG

2003: A Profile of Mihaela Stănuleț – “The Olympic Champion Is Freezing at the Sports School Club”

In November 2003, Ziarul de Sibiu (The Sibiu Newspaper) published this profile of Mihaela Stănuleț, who won team silver at the 1983 World Championships and won Olympic gold with Romania’s team in Los Angeles in 1984. The article captures the harsh realities facing retired gymnasts in post-communist Romania. Even Olympic champions struggled to find work, were asked to return their competition tracksuits, and trained new generations in unheated gyms with decades-old equipment.

Like many of her contemporaries, Stănuleț had competed underage: born in 1967, she was only 14 when she placed fourth with Romania’s team at the 1981 World Championships in Moscow, a year before she would have been eligible under the age-15 minimum. By the time she reached the Olympics three years later, the system that had rushed her into elite competition as a child offered little in return for her gold medal—just 16,000 lei instead of the promised 100,000 and no car despite assurances. (Ecaterina Szabó made similar remarks about unfulfilled promises.) The article reveals how completely Romania’s gymnasts were discarded once their competitive value expired.

Oh, and there’s a story about Béla Károlyi’s dogs.

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