Simona Pauca: mom and coach

Video capture used courtesy of Seether

1984 Olympic champion Simona Păucă decided to become seriously involved in coaching. She coached gymnastics before, for short periods of time (2 years in Bucharest and a few months in Satu Mare), but she was never this determined to establish a gymnastics training center. At the end of last year, Simona, her husband, Gheorghe Rus, and their daughter, Ana, moved from Satu Mare to Cluj, where they re-established the gymnastics program of CSM Cluj with help from the local Youth And Sports Program. Simona smiles as she thinks about her future plans. "My dream would be to build a national training center here in a few years, one that would rival the ones at Deva and Onesti, and to have one of the gymnasts I coach make the senior national team," she adds emotionally.

The bronze medal won by Simona during the all-around competition at the 1984 Olympics came as a surprise to many people, given the fact she was only 15 year old and had only moved up to the senior national team that same year. "I won gold with the Romanian team and the same medal on beam, which was my favorite event, but people still believed the bronze medal from the AA was unexpected because it was a very hard competition," recalls Simona 17 years after the event. "I was a little disappointed because a lot of times I heard people saying I got lucky because the teams from USSR and East Germany weren't there. When there's so much work involved, there can't be much talk about luck in gymnastics," confessed the Olympic champ.

Just one year after the Olympics, Simona was forced to return to her home club of Dinamo Bucharest. "My father got into a fight with the coaches at Deva. I have no idea what he was thinking, but I do know they didn't pay as much attention to me as before, so I was forced to leave. I kept training until the summer of 1986 and then I had to give up gymnastics for good. It was a sad moment, but I was already 17, and time seems to go by even faster for gymnasts," adds Simona. She finished high school in Bucharest and later on got her coaching degree.

In 1993, Simona married Gheorghe Rus, chairman of the board for Castrum Corporation, one of Romania's most successful business firms. He plans to help build a full gym in Cluj, complete with dorms. Even though there is a 20 year age difference between the two, Simona says that "I couldn't have found a better man, who could understand me and make me feel like I have a real family. " A year later her daughter Ana was born, and she has already started gymnastics. "She really likes it, but I thinks she's still afraid to do certain skills. I hope to bring in other girls alongside hers and start the actual training," said Simona who has been visiting local schools and kindergartens looking for prospective future gymnasts. "They have to be small, tiny and flexible. The rest is my job, and I can hardly wait to prove I can be a good coach," she explains.

At 31 years old, Simona says that if she had a choice she'd do everything all over again. "The joy you feel when you win an Olympic gold medal, or the sadness that comes when you're not chosen to represent your country in a major event cannot be replaced by anything else. Gymnastics is my life," she concludes. Petite and almost unchanged since she won her Olympics gold, Simona looks like one of her students. Her 6 year old daughter does whatever it take to get back up on the beam. She's just working on walking on beam, but she smiles towards her coach. "I'm gonna win too, right mommy?"

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