Viorel Gasca, president of the Romanian Sambo Federation, gave a special interview for the website eurosambo.com sharing the upcoming plans for the rest of 2017.
“The programme until the end of the year is very comprehensive. Recently, we have been to Kazakhstan with the women’s national team. The results are outstanding: three athletes won three medals! I am very pleased that the members of the national youth team managed to win.”
On August 1-20 we will have a sports camp in Piatra Arce. It is located in the mountains at 2000 meters above sea level. The youth team and the senior women’s national team are going to train there.
I would like to mention that the qualification of the youth national team to the II European Games to be held in Minsk in 2019 has been already started.
On August 20 we are returning from our sports camp in the mountains, and later, in the next two days we will be going to Kstovo (Nizhny Novgorod region, Russia) to participate in the international camp for athletes.
After this event our women’s national team will head to South Korea to take part in the FIAS President’s Cup, and in September the men’s national team will participate in the International tournament “Memorial Tschocheli” in Georgia.
As for sambo development in Romania, a pilot project has been launched called “Be smart, but not furious”. In this regard, a demonstration tournament made for the children from orphanages was staged by the Romanian Sambo Federation jointly with the police of Ilfov region. After the event some basic movements of sambo were explained to the children, in particular the safe and secure fall protection. Children liked it very much!
We decided to develop this social activity. The children, who took part in the demonstration tournament, learned how to protect themselves against falls; they have been also invited to the training camp in the mountains to see how the strongest athletes do their trainings.
After successfully staging the tournament, we received a feedback from the Romanian Ministry of Internal Affairs. This project was highly appreciated and it was also proposed to finance the holding of the same project in two regions: Prohava and Dâmbovița.
In the future we plan to implement this project across the country. In the framework of the sambo tournaments for children we will run sambo demonstrations performed by children from orphanages. I think this activity is very positive for sambo development.
Often, when children turn 18 they have nothing to do. We propose the possibility of education, accommodation and board to them; also they will be able to practice sambo.
Besides this, the Romanian Sambo Federation is planning another important activity jointly with the National Anti-Drug Agency and the Bucharest metro. We suggest to run a PR campaign, which will allow the public to get familiar with sambo rules, sambo history and the best Romanian athletes. Also the posters with Daniela Poroineanu and Codrina Ionescu in sambo uniform will be stuck at the Bucharest Metropolitan. I am sure that it will be a successful PR campaign for sambo promotion in Romania."