RRI Sports Club: Sports legends lend names to TAROM aircraft
A new TAROM aircraft is named after a great champion: Ivan Patzaichin
Florin Orban, 26.08.2026, 13:45
A new Boeing 737 MAX aircraft is now part of the fleet of the national airline TAROM. It will be named after the great champion Ivan Patzaichin, four-time Olympic gold medalist and multiple-times world and European canoe champion, who passed in September 2021.
With this choice, TAROM carries on an initiative to name company aircraft after personalities who represented Romania at the highest level and whose performances became landmarks for entire generations, a company statement reads. Also this year, the first new Boeing 737 MAX in the company’s fleet was named after the great football player and coach Mircea Lucescu, who left us in April. The first aircraft in the TAROM fleet to be named after a Romanian athlete was Nadia Comăneci, a Boeing 737-800 named after the great gymnastics champion in April 2024. The aircraft later flew the Romanian team to the Paris Olympic Games.
The ceremony in which the naming procotol was signed took place last Wednesday, in the presence of Georgiana Patzaichin, the great champion’s wife, and Ivona, his daughter. “As a child, my father was passionate about the few planes that flew in the sky. He really wanted to become a pilot. Later, on all his departures for sports competitions, he would only fly TAROM. He was one of the fans who entered the cockpit. Now Ivan is back up in the sky, and the aircraft with his name completes the dream of the child born in the Delta, in an extremely special way,” Ivona Patzaichin said.
Ivan Patzaichin was the greatest Romanian canoeist of all time. Throughout his career, he won 8 world championships, between 1970 and 1983, as well as 4 Olympic gold medals at the 5 editions of the Games in which he took part between 1968 and 1984. For years after the end of his competitive career, Ivan Patzaichin was the coach of the Romanian national kayak and canoe teams, with whom he won dozens of other medals in continental, world and Olympic competitions. Later he became one of the main promoters of the Danube Delta, of the people and traditions there. (AMP)
