Impressive message for the world champion: “Dear David Popovici, you manage to gather us all in one place. You show us that it is enough to be integrity”

“You have become the pride of a people who deserve more and do not know what to do and are wandering after dangerous models,” writes journalist Iulia Blaga, about the significance beyond sport of today's extraordinary performance of David Popovici.

Dear David Popovici,

I am from the generation of your parents, but I think you understand things that the age of my parents do not understand. Your maturity is not related to life experience or sports performance. I followed you, like the other Romanians, from your first great successes, and I watched your interviews and things you said and done next to sport.

I do not think you are “just an ordinary boy who swims quickly”, as you said in the interview for “El País”, two years ago. I think you know very well how many parallels you do and I think you have become aware of what you have to do. You said it alone: Swimming is the profession but, starting from it, you want to help. Do more than earn 300 hundred medals.

And this, I allow myself to say with my few knowledge in the field, there is something special in the world of sport.

We all grow up with the idea that great athletes must be great people, strong characters. This amuses me, because the great artists are not asked to be great people, many are often sorry. But what you have succeeded in such a short time is not related only to sport, although it demonstrates a strong character.

“This boy is not like us”

Interestingly, from the first successes, you said you want to put them in the service of others. As if you were waiting for the moment conducive to reveal your mission.

It is something unusual to you – from the way you swim as if you came from a planet where only water is, to the opening to the others. Between them are your integrity, modesty, but also self -confidence, cleanliness and maturity. The way you share the successes with us. I almost ask you: What did you give you to eat when you were little?

Not for nothing the taxi driver you mentioned in Dragoș Pătraru asked if you were taking supplements. I do not think that I was going to take something non -compliant, I think it expresses what we all think: this boy is not like us.

But you tell us that we can be like you, that anyone can do what you do. Not only performance, but to put it into the service of others.

A kind of missionary.

Keanu Reeves of Natation

When you said, last year at Digi24: “I am embarrassed to swim,” you reminded me of Keanu Reeves. He does not have in his acting the talent from his birth, but he also realized that the notoriety helps him to show that it is important to be good. And for him acting is just a profession.

You could be an extraordinary actor-or have any talent to put you under the light of the spotlight, because you need to know the world to do your job.

It has been a few years since you have been in the water foam and you are well placed on the orbit-and I do not mean here to the medals, but to the purification you started in the country by the power of example.

You know, not so, that the good is propagated.

“The value is more important than the image”

Only three years have passed and you are not just a champion that took its role seriously. You have become the pride of a people who deserve more and do not know what to do and wander after dangerous models.

You manage to gather us all in one place. You show us that it is enough to be integral. Each one, day by day, with respect for themselves to be seen in respect for others.

That the value is more important than the image.

That the collective good will come when we recognize what is authentic and valuable, not Phariseism and demagogy.

“It was the fear of victory, but still fear”

After the first gold medal in Singapore (200 meters) you talked about fear. People are afraid of it because it is perceived as weakness of character.

“Strong people are not afraid,” we are taught as little. “The boys never cry”.

Some of us are taken after models of men who talk with a box between the eyebrows and only smile rarely and sprinkled, but then shake the fist.

Interestingly, you have chosen to share with us your feeling of … panic, I think, if it made you want to return home. It was the fear of victory, but still fear, the effect of an extraordinary pressure – or, we are taught that a champion is not afraid of anything or, if he does, no.

You said it for us, didn't you? “Health in the tick”, as you called it, is important for us. How well we know this without knowing …

Fear of the groom in front of the altar. The feeling of a threshold, perhaps, beyond which nothing will be the same. Maybe you'll tell us.

“What words to find when you have already exhausted all the superlatives”

And now you have taken the gold medal at 100 meters and you removed the tongue, like a child who made a driver. And the TVR commentator called you “this monstrous swimmer”. Indeed, what words to find when you have already exhausted all the superlatives.

Dear David Popovici, you are a clean child who pulls a nation after him. We are monstrous proud of you and thank you.

Because your youth rests on the wisdom of someone who seems to have seen a lot, and because on August 1 it was Gellu Naum's day (and he is a champion in poetry), look at a poem like a movement-back in the basin of time:

“The city had a single house
The house had only one room
The room had only one wall
The wall had only one clock

The clock had only one language
All this time children
raised and asked a single question
While puzzled and superb adults
they were falling down by smiling. “

(“Crust”)