In 2015, Roxana Popa of Spain thought her gymnastics career was over. In 2019, she was able to compete at the World Championships again, helped her team qualify to the Olympics and made an event final at Worlds for the first time in her career. Popa talked to Newtral.es about the challenges she had to overcome in her career.
As she was born in Romania, the media started to compare her to great Romanian gymnasts quite early. Popa says she was even called the new Nadia Comaneci but she didn’t really care about those expectations:
“Really, the holder of the “Nadia Comaneci” title at that time, but for a 12-year-old girl it was… irrelevant… absolutely irrelevant. She [my 12 year-old self] just wanted to do flips, to compete and compete.”
At 13, she had her first big injury – elbow – which limited her career. She even thought it was more severe than her knee injuries but those turned out potentially career-ending:
“The elbow injury, in my point of view, was more severe than the knee. Because I am no longer able to do the supination of the arm. But the knee, well, it bothers me occasionally and can be an obstacle to doing gymnastics. It’s like a snowball effect, my knee is still hurting, I relapse again. My knee hurts even walking down stairs, in absolutely everything.”
Feeling like she had no control over the outcome of her injury was extremely hard:
“The hardest moment was when they [doctors] told me that I had to close this chapter of my life, because I could not keep keep going. And that they couldn’t do anything about it. And the most difficult was to know that I didn’t want that but I couldn’t do anything, I couldn’t keep going. That wasn’t getting in my head, I was like “it can’t be, it can’t be”.
At first, when she started training and coming back again, she was constantly afraid to re-injure her knee. Now, after going through two competitions successfully, she feels she can enjoy gymnastics without worrying about injuries all the time:
“Right after the meet in the Netherlands, two weeks away from Worlds, knowing that everything went well, that everything was cool… Then I went to Worlds and I didn’t even think about my knee. Of course, I was careful but I wasn’t panicking or scared. The thorn that I had before, that took me off my path, I could have been retired. But now, notice that I am back on my path, on the path I had created before.”
“For those going through this, my advice is breath and take your time. In the end, time will put you on your path and you will see what you want and what you don’t. Now I finally feel like myself again. During all this time, I felt empty, not doing something that completes me. And I am finally enjoying it like a little girl again, I am enjoying it again.”
Quotes by Roxana Popa were translated from Spanish by Pedro C.
