| 26. Florenta Oancea. Member of Romanian junior national team, 1999-2001. Article orginally published in 'Gazeta Sporturilor' February 1, 2004. |
| Florenta Oancea was the junior who was featured on the cover of in International Gymnast in February 1999 together with Floarea Leonida. Florenta was born on the 25th of April 1987 in Bucharest. Now she's speaking out to support Oana Petrovschi's story as they were in the junior team together and trained by Lucian Sandu and Benone Pereteanu. Florenta's medical problems weren't identified either and she had to retire at the end of 2001 before she became a senior gymnast. She was diagnosed with necrosis of the femoral. (necrosis is death of cells in an organ or tissue and femoral is the thigh bone). Oana says she had been complaining of pain in her hip for 4 months but the doctors in Deva didn't identify the problems. Florenta talks about the medical problems as well as her desire for sweets, the insults and the hitting. Florenta explains that Oana Petrovschi hasn't lied and that the insults in Deva are a form of greeting, that's how often they are used. She has been in the gym during the training sessions of Belu and Bitang and she's heard the ugly things the coaches said. Bitang hadn't insulted her because she was still a junior when Petrovschi was a senior but they trained in the same gym. She was trained by Lucian Sandu and Benone Pereteanu but she's heard Bitang insult her gymnasts. However she didn't escape insults from the coaches either. They told her that she was crooked, a cow, lame and handicapped but she considers that wasn't the problem, the hitting was. Florenta: "I got real hitting, not just a slap like Oana. Lucian Sandu slapped me very often and two or three times he went much further. I didn't always keep my mouth shut because some gymnasts were treated differently. I answered back sometimes. Once, being nervous, Sandu slapped me. After that more and more: to the head, on my back, across my face and he also kicked my behind. I was crying but he still kept hitting me." Oana Petrovschi said it was a sport to try and escape from Deva and so did Florenta. "I did it several times. In our building the windows were nailed shut. By accident my window wasn't and that's how I escaped to town. We all did it. We collected money, each of us said what they wanted and before we jumped out of the window, we memorised the list. We ran to the shop where we bought biscuits, chocolate, sweets, juice and croissants. We always ate them before going to bed. We pecked at them during the afternoon too." Then she explains why she didn't get into the senior team, because of her injury. She had been complaining about the pain in her hip between July and November 2001 but they didn't really believe her but she had been to some medical check ups in Deva. They didn't find anything. Then at the National Championships in Ploiesti in November she fell on her head off bars. They took her into hospital and they checked her hip as well and then they discovered her injury. Florenta: "Practically I have no more cartilage between the thighbone and the pelvis and some blood vessels don't function anymore. The doctors were stunned: 'How could you train with such pain?' Luckily I fell on my head because otherwise it could have been worsened. Specialist Marius Filip explains: "The earlier it appears the more serious the thighbone necrosis and in the long run it could lead to invalidity." Former gymnast Florenta Oancea was diagnosed with this disease in November 2001, four months after she complained to the coaches of a constant pain in her hip. |