The road to the Olympic Games

Wrestler Alina Vuc

Florin Orban, 11.06.2020, 13:45

In the history of its participation to the Olympic Games, Romania won 33 medals in wrestling, of which 7 gold, 8 silver and 19
bronze. All of them came from the men’s competitions. At the 2004 Athens Games,
however, the Olympic programme also introduced women’s wrestling. At the moment,
only one Romanian female wrestler has qualified for the Tokyo Olympic Games. She
is Alina Vuc, who booked her Olympic ticket after the World Championships held
in September last year in Nursultan, the capital of Kazakhstan. She won the
silver medal in the 50 kg category.

In the
World Championship preliminaries, Vuc defeated the German wrestler Ellen
Riesterer and Taiwan’s Meng Hsuan Hsieh in the round of last 16. She then
defeated the European champion and bronze medallist at the 2018 World
Championships Oksana Livac of Ukraine in the quarterfinals and the Kazakh wrestler
Valentina Brik in the semifinals. In the final, Vuc lost to Azerbaijan’s Maria
Stadnik, a many-times European champion, former world champion and Olympic
vice-champion.

Alina Vuc
was born on 4th October 1993 in Resita, in western Romania. She took
up wrestling when she was ten years old, when she joined the local club CSM
Resita. She later joined the Steaua Bucharest army sports club. Her first notable
success as a senior came in 2016 when she won the silver medal at the European
Championships in Riga, having been defeated in the final by Azerbaijan’s Maria
Stadnik. Vuc then qualified for the 2016 Olympic Games, but she lost in the
first round. One year later in Paris, she won the silver medal at the World
Championships in the 48 kg category. This was the first medal ever won by a
Romanian female wrestler in a world competition.