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CATALINA PONOR
Catalina Ponor (born August 20, 1987) is a gymnast from Constanta, Romania. After beginning training
with the national team in 2002, Ponor has won several medals with the Romanian team, along with individual beam and floor
exercise medals. Hardly known until late 2003, Ponor has made several achievements in her career as a gymnast. Her career
highlights include the 2003 World Championships, where she was a triple silver medalist, and 2004 European Gymnastics
Championships and 2004 Summer Olympics, both of which she was a triple gold medalist.
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September 2, 2007 | Stuttgart, Germany
Portrait of Romanian gymnast Catalina Ponor at the 2007 World Championships.
Photograph copyright © Tom Theobald. |
Ponor was selected to move to Deva, the location of the training facility for the Romanian national gymnastics team,
in 2002, after national team coaches Octavian Belu and Mariana Bitang discovered her during a holiday in Constanta. The next year,
Ponor was selected for the team for the World Artistic Gymnastics Championships in Anaheim, U.S., where she won a silver medal
with the Romanian team, as well as individual silver medals on balance beam and floor.
In 2004, Ponor followed up her result at the World Championships with even higher finishes at the European Championships
in Amsterdam. Ponor won three gold medals at the event, with the team, on balance beam, and on floor exercise.
Ponor followed up her performance at the European Championships by capturing three gold medals on the same events
(team, balance beam and floor exercise) at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, Greece — a gold in every event she entered,
unprecedented in Olympic gymnastics. She was part of an immensely successful Romanian women's gymnastics team (four
golds, one silver and one bronze in six events) that also included Oana Ban, Monica Rosu,
Silvia Stroescu, Daniela Sofronie and Alexandra Eremia. Though the team members were less experienced than most of their rivals,
the Romanians hit every routine to take the team gold by a comfortable margin. World champions the USA were second, and the
Russians led by Svetlana Khorkina took the bronze.
Ponor scored 9.787 to win beam, the highest women's score of the entire Olympics, where she beat overall champion
Carly Patterson on her best apparatus. Her teammate Alexandra Eremia was third.
Ponor followed this with a 9.750 to easily win floor, in a final where many gymnasts faltered. This performance earned
her a place in the record books: no female gymnast had won three gold medals in the same Olympics since her compatriot
Daniela Silivas, in 1988. Others to have achieved this honor include
Nadia Comaneci,
Ecaterina Szabo,
Nellie Kim,
Olga Korbut and
Larissa Latynina. Ponor was also the only gymnast in that Olympic Games to use
the difficult full-in dismount from beam. Though once a reasonably common sight in the mid-1990s, it had virtually disappeared
after the 2000 Olympics. Normally, her standard dismount was a double pike, but, with
Carly Patterson performing her signature dismount (tucked double arabian),
Ponor added a full twist in the first summersault to prevent Patterson of winning the gold medal at the event finals.
The Olympics was one of the only meets where Ponor did that dismount. She subsequently returned to performing a double
pike back dismount.
Following her Olympic success, Ponor competed in various exhibitions and in more minor competitions, such as the Glasgow
Grand Prix. She crowned a successful year at the 2004 World Cup Final in Birmingham, where she won gold on beam and silver on floor.
That year, Ponor remained undefeated on the beam in major competitions.
At the 2005 European Championships, Ponor again won the gold on the balance beam, easily beating the competition with
her new routine including two handstands, a double spin, and a tumbling line including five different skills landed perfectly.
But the Olympic champion failed to medal on the floor, as she went out of bounds on one of her tumbling passes and finished
in fourth place.
In November 2005 at the World Artistic Gymnastics Championships in Melbourne, Ponor was one of only two Romanian female
gymnasts selected by the Romanian Gymnastics Federation to compete (the other being Florica Leonida). After an uncharacteristic
wobble on the balance beam, Ponor took home only a bronze medal. She did not qualify to floor finals and did not compete
on vault or bars.
The Romanian gymnastics team had a new coach for 2006, Nicolae Forminte. However, Ponor stated that she did not want to
train with Forminte. Instead, she continued to train with Matei Stanei, her coach before joining the Romanian National Team.
Ponor competed at the European Championships that year. Additionally, she announced that she would retire after that competition,
citing lingering knee problems as the reason that she could no longer continue in the sport. Despite her injury, she had
managed some upgrades. In the beam final, she became the first gymnast ever to successfully perform a five element tumbling
series in a major competition, and in doing so retained her title. Ponor was the first athlete ever to win three consecutive
European beam titles. (The great Vera Cáslavská also won three,
though not consecutively). She also showed a new floor routine, with unusual flexibility elements that she had not performed
before, and more dance and musical interpretation than other gymnasts have typically shown under the new code; most now need to
use four or five passes. The Romanians also took team silver, a remarkable comeback considering the state of the program only
six months before, but a disappointment to them since the team would have won were it not for a fall on the last piece
of apparatus.
Ponor resumed training with her coach, Matei Stanei, in 2007 after returning from Japan, but after a bout of illness
she was not present at the 2007 European Championships. She competed in the 2007 World Artistic Gymnastics Championships,
her first international competition since 2006 European Gymnastics Championships. In the team preliminaries, she competed
on vault, beam and floor. She, along with compatriot Steliana Nistor, qualified
for the balance beam event final in second place with a score of 16.250 just behind top qualifier Li Shanshan of China.
In the team finals, she competed only on vault and beam. Her 15.000 score on vault was the highest score ever given to a
1-1/2 twisting Yurchenko in the new code of points. She and her teammates eventually won the bronze after a Russian
gymnast messed up on vault. Ponor finished 4th on balance beam final.
In December 2007, Ponor announced her retirement from the sport.
For more information, visit her
profile page on the Fédération Internationale de Gymnastique website.
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