BUCHAREST, April 12, 2022 – “To know oneself, to master oneself, to conquer oneself, this is the eternal beauty of sport, the aspirations of the true athlete and the conditions of his success,” Pierre de Coubertin once said.
This is also the main idea behind this third edition of the book “Inscriptions on the Column of Romanian Gymnastics, by well-known sports journalist Emanuel Fântâneanu, AIPS Executive Committee Member, author of other 14 encyclopedic books dedicated to sports (the Olympics, equestrian, rugby, volleyball, table tennis).
The 1600 pages of the first edition of 2017, completed with a volume in 2021, have now reached this third edition of over 3000 pages, through new, new information and a thousand illustrations. Shards of history, shards of true stories, and, especially, people, athletes, gymnasts, and gymnasts, beyond them… It is, however, impossible to grasp the universe…
More than 3000 pages, an incursion into the history of universal and Romanian gymnastics and its new organizational structures, in order to better understand the place and purpose of Romanian gymnastics; the path followed by this sport on our shores, from the past centuries to today, year by year almost day by day from VII century B.C. to 2022, in chapters such as “From Gymnos as a heritage”, “A special mission”, “The autumn of becoming”, “From the ‘Federal Celebrations’ to the National Championships”, “Romanian Internationals Championships a half-century history” and more. It continues with a reminiscence of the great international competitions (Olympic Games, World Championships, European Championships, Balkan Championships, and more), from the first Romanian participations to the present, with their great successes and deep defeats, as it has been and will be in sport (“The Olympic epic reads like a novel”, “World geometers”, Treasures of the ‘Old Continent’, “A beautiful Balkan story”, etc.). to conclude, with Pierre de Coubertin’s motto – “For a hundred people to be engaged in physical culture, fifty must do sport; for fifty to do sport, twenty must specialize; for twenty to specialize, five must be capable of astonishing performances” – with an attempt to forget the many “builders” of the gymnastics edifice (“She’s perfect! – perfect 10”, Coaches Emeritus, Masters and Masters Emeritus of the sport, Top 10 gymnast of the year, International referees, Place where legends meet – Hall of Fame, Awards, Trophies, Distinctions, Olympic, World, European, National all time podium, over 300 short biographies of the and for the final an album with almost 600 photos).
“Inscriptions on the Column of Romanian Gymnastics”, which totals over ten years of work for Emanuel Fântâneanu, is a unique book in the bibliography of Romanian gymnastics and Romanian sport, more than an encyclopedia, a book that, we hope, fully fulfills its mission, because as the famous philosopher Denis Diderot once said, “the purpose of an encyclopedia is to gather knowledge. … the people we live next to, and to pass it on to the people who come after us; so that the works of past centuries may not be useless works for centuries to come; so that our grandchildren, by becoming more educated, may at the same time become more virtuous and happier…
Magda Petrescu – Chief Editor of “I Love Romanian Gymnastics”
