Olivia Cimpian won’t be able to compete until December of 2019

Olivia Cimpian last competed internationally for Romania in the spring of 2017. Due to a disarray in the Romanian gymnastics federation, her parents decided to move her to Hungary since she also had the Hungarian citizenship. However, the Romanian federation wasn’t willing to release her right away and so the FIG executive committee imposed a one-year waiting period until she was allowed to compete for Hungary.

This summer, however, Cimpian moved back to Romania and joined the national team again. Her father cited issues with her education as the main reason for the move back. Cimpian was never able to compete for Hungary during her stay there and missed a whole year of her senior career due to the nationality change that did not result in anything. If you think that’s quite enough for a teen who’s not exactly in charge of her place of residence, apparently, FIG does not agree with you. At the latest FIG Executive Committee meeting, Cimpian was allowed to change her license back to Romania but there’s another one-year waiting period meaning that she will only be able to start competing in December of 2019. This isn’t a very common situation: if you look through FIG EC’s nationality change decisions throughout the years, you’ll see that most changes are effective immediately. For example, Nikita Simonov and Ivan Tikhonov, ex-Russian gymnasts, left the Russian national team in June, competed at the Azerbaijan national championships the same month and got their nationality change approved on July 26th, effective immediately – just in time for the European Championships where they represented Azerbaijan. It is not clear why Cimpian has a second waiting period imposed on her considering she never actually competed for Hungary, and since the senior WAG career is often not very long, having to miss two years of competition during her prime competitive years seems like a cruel and unnecessary punishment.

UPD: As it turns out, the issue with the mandatory waiting periods is due to the Romanian and Hungarian federations being petty, as according to the FIG rules, an athlete has to wait one year to compete if the federation doesn’t release them. So, originally, Romania refused to release Cimpian to Hungary and then this year Hungary was like “Remember how you tried to screw us last year? We’re paying you back”, while Cimpian, is being failed by the adults around her and getting caught in this circle of pettiness. I wish that FIG had some rules to ensure that situations like this don’t happen, but it seems that the current president, Morinari Watanabe, is going in a different direction and trying to make nationality changes even harder.

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