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| Ekaterina Szabo - the nearly Gold | ||||||||||||||
| Ekaterina was the lucky little one who had the Olympic Gold in her hand - and let it go. | ||||||||||||||
| Results | ||||||||||||||
| Winner of both 1980 and 1982 Jr. Europeans, she was coached by Bela Karolyi until his defect to the USA. Very strong, exuberantly good in every apparaus, she had her way drawn to Gold when she led her Romanian Team to the LA Olympics. | ||||||||||||||
| Back | ||||||||||||||
| They did win the Team Gold, as well as every apparatus she qualified into the finals. But she slipped to Silver by the slightest margin to Mary Lou Retton, the only american Olympic all around champion. | ||||||||||||||
| Undoubtly she was a lot more meritory to win than Retton, but the boycott was very much in the judges heads and I suppose it had to be a chance of a victory to the house camp, as they knew that with the Russians the USA had no way of getting into the podium - I mean, WHO would? Shushunova, Yurchenko, all the big guns weren't there because of that stupid boycott. But it was such a pitty; if the USA hadn't missed the Moscow Games, maybe they wouldn't get that answer. Even though a house gymnast won, everybody knew that wouldn't happen in normal circunstances, so the result was fair. It wasn't a real victory for neither of them. | ||||||||||||||
| But Szabo was one of the powers of her time; she was in the top three in most of the competitions she entered in her long international career - this is one of the reasons Mary Lou Retton hasn't got a place here. She had a lot of missing skills in her SHORT competitive career. Guess that despite Karolyi was the best coach of his time it wasn't enough for her to get high in the big names of gymnastics. | ||||||||||||||
| Anyway, Ekaterina retired in 1987, took a course in Bucharest and moved to France as a coach with her husband Christian Tamas in 1992. | ||||||||||||||