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| Birth Name(s) : Catalina Ponor |
Date of Birth: N/A |
| Status:
Single
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Full Catalina Ponor Biography
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.
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 Silivaş in 1988. Others to have achieved this honor include Nadia Comaneci, Ecaterina Szabo, Nelli 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 '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.
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. Ponor was the first athlete ever to win three consecutive European beam titles (the great Vera Caslavska 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 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 competed in the 2007 Artistic Gymnastics World Championships in Stuttgart, Germany (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 1.5 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. She will have to wait another 2 years to become a beam world champion. |
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