Comaneci/Facebook After poor performance at Test event, Rio Olympics final qualifier, Romania missed out on a place in the women'...
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| Comaneci/Facebook |
After poor performance at Test event, Rio Olympics final qualifier, Romania missed out on a place in the women's Olympic team event for the first time since 1968.
Legendary gymnast Nadia Comaneci expressed her sadness at her country's failure to qualify to the Olympics.
"This result is not a coincidence. We all knew and anticipated that someday it will come down to this" Comaneci said in a statement to Fanatik.ro, translated by Aly126.
"Unfortunately this moment has come and after all these years, we’ll no longer send a full team to the Olympics. We don’t have coaches, and we pay the ones we do have very poorly, we don’t have athletes."
"In Romania there are around 100 gymnasts at the moment, while in the US there are about 4 million children doing gymnastics. We have 5- 6 gyms. There are 250.000 in the US."
This year will mark the 40th anniversary of Nadia's perfect 10, which the athlete has said she will celebrate by attending the games in Rio. Unfortunately, there will be no Romanian team to celebrate with.
In the meantime Romanian coach Nicolae Forminte, who trained the national team between 2005 and 2010, vowed to try his best to help the Romanian team get back on their feet.
"I’m very sad. Please, don’t ask me what happened or what the causes are, as the pain of a person being in the know is greater because of not being able to shout the truth to the world. And that’s just because it won’t help. Once again it’s proven that you can’t be a prophet in your own country. The guilt must be shared. I can’t do anything else but promise that I will do my best to help gymnastics get back on the right track."
Written by Gigi Farid
.PNG)
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