Cătălina Ponor

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Cătălina Ponor

Medal record
Representing  Romania
Artistic Gymnastics
{{{1}}}
	2004 Athens	Team competition
	2004 Athens	Balance beam
	2004 Athens	Floor exercise
World Championships
	2003 Anaheim	Team
	2003 Anaheim	Balance Beam
	2003 Anaheim	Floor Exercise
	2005 Melbourne	Balance Beam
	2007 Stuttgart	Team Competition
European Championships
	2004 Amsterdam	Team
	2004 Amsterdam	Balance beam
	2004 Amsterdam	Floor Exercise
	2005 Debrecen	Balance beam
	2006 Volos	Balance beam
	2006 Volos	Team
	2006 Volos	Floor Exercise

Cătălina Ponor (born August 20, 1987) is a gymnast from Constanţa, 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.

Following the Olympic games, Ponor has become involved in controversies, but has also triumphed at several competitions. After winning a gold medal at the 2006 European Championships, Ponor decided to retire because of injuries. Despite this, she has resumed training and plans to compete at the 2008 Summer Olympics.

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 Constanţa. The next year Ponor was selected for the team for the World Artistic Gymnastics Championships in Anaheim, USA, where she won a silver medal with the Romanian team, as well as individual silver medals on balance beam and floor. In the European Championships, Catalina won the gold in the even final, and her teammate Alexandra Ermia, also an Olympic champion, won the silver.exercise.^[1]

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.^[2]

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 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.^[3]

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.^[3] 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 Silivaş in 1988. Others to have achieved this honor include Nadia Comaneci, Ecaterina Szabo, Nelli Kim, Olga Korbut and Larissa Latynina.([1]} 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 '90s, it had virtually disappeared after the 2000 Olympics.

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.

In August of that year, Ponor and teammates Florica Leonida and Alexandra Eremia left training camp and went to a party at a Bucharest night club. Consequently, the Romanian Gymnastics Federation opted to dissolve the team and sent Ponor and her teammates back to their home clubs to train. Ponor returned to her home club, Farul Constanţa, to train with her first coach, Matei Stanei.

However, 2005 also brought some triumphs. At the 2005 European Championships, Ponor again won the gold on the balance beam, easily beating the competition. With her new routine including 2 handstands, a double spin, and a tumbling line inclding 5 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. Ponor was distraught at this and was seen crying afterwards.

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.^[4] Ponor was the first athlete ever to win three consecutive European beam titles (the great Vera Caslavska also won three, though not consecutively).{[http//www.gymn-forum.com/results.html]} 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. Stanei has noted that Ponor is completely certain of her decision to return to gymnastics. When asked about Ponor's decision to return to gymnastics, the Romanian gymnastics team's coach Forminte commented: "She hasn't trained with me for Euros and it's not my problem. If she wants to return, very good. There will always be a place for another gymnast in Romania. Even though all the gymnasts who have recently retired would come back, there still wouldn't be too many gymnasts in the country. At this moment however, I'm not the selector to say if she's prepared or not to come back."^[5]

Ponor has expressed an interest in trying for the 2008 Olympic team, but after a bout of illness she was not present at the 2007 European Championships. Currently, Ponor trains with Mariana Bitang, one of the head coaches of the 2004 Olympic Team. Ponor has made significant advances on her marquee events, beam and floor. She plans to compete in the 2007 World Championships of Gymnastics.^{[citation needed]}.She has new floor and beam routines with some important changes. She wishes to be Olympic champion again and would like to become World champion on the balance beam.

2004

Vault: Double-twisting Yurchenko
Uneven Bars: Jump to handstand on low bar; toe shoot to high bar, kip, cast to handstand; giant 1/2, Jaeger release, kip, cast to handstand; giant 1/2, Ling, Bi, straddle back to low bar; stoop to high bar; giant, double pike dismount.
Balance Beam: Scale; Onodi, front aerial, back handspring, one-armed back handspring, layout stepout; switch leap, Kochetkova; front aerial, back handspring, two foot back layout; full turn; Omelianchik to split and straddle handstand; Round-off, double pike dismount (also capable of a round-off to full in dismount, used this in Olympics)
Floor Exercise: Triple turn, Popa; round-off-back-handspring- pike-full in; round-off-back-handspring-2.5 twist to a front layout; round-off-back-handspring-triple twist; cat leap double, cat leap 1.5; tuck double; round-off-back-handspring-piked double back.

2006

Vault: 1.5 twisting Yurchenko
Balance Beam: Press to split handstand mount; Onodi, front aerial, Kotchetkova, back handspring, 2 foot back layout; Wolf jump, split leap; 2 1/4 turn; switch leap, Omelianchik to split and straddle handstand; Round-off, double pike dismount
Floor Exercise: Triple turn; round-off, back handspring, piked-full in; round-off, back handspring, 2 1/2 twist to punch front layout; double high Arabesque turn; full-twisting switch leap; ring leap; round-off, back handspring, double pike; switch leap, straddle jump; round-off, back handspring, double twist.

• 2003: "Bronx Machine"
• 2004: "Gia" by Despina Vandi
• 2006: "The Underground" from the soundtrack to The Truman Show and a piece of Greek panflute music
• 2007: Edvin Marton-Dark Angel

• Bio at romanian-gymnastics.com