Daniela Silivaș

Daniela Silivaș is a Romanian gymnast born in Deva in 1972 who became one of the dominant artistic gymnasts of the late 1980s. She began training at the age of six at the Deva gymnastics school under coaches Adrian Goreac and later Octavian Belu, and she joined the Romanian national team while still in primary school.

At the 1985 World Championships in Montreal, at the age of thirteen, she helped Romania win the team silver and took gold on the balance beam. Two years later, at the 1987 World Championships in Rotterdam, she contributed to Romania's team gold and won the floor exercise title. She was the first gymnast to perform a double back layout dismount on uneven bars in international competition.

At the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games she won six medals, the most of any gymnast at those Games: gold on balance beam, uneven bars, and floor exercise; silver in the all-around behind the Soviet Union's Elena Shushunova; and bronze with the Romanian team and on vault. She also matched Nadia Comăneci's perfect score of 10.0 seven times during the Seoul competition.

A serious knee injury and the political upheaval that followed the Romanian revolution of 1989 cut short her competitive career after the 1989 World Championships, where she added more medals to her record. She was inducted into the International Gymnastics Hall of Fame in 2002 and later moved to the United States, where she has worked as a coach and judge.

The name Daniela is the feminine form of Daniel, from the Hebrew Daniyyel, traditionally interpreted as God is my judge. The biblical prophet Daniel carried the masculine form throughout the Christian and Jewish worlds, and the feminine spread widely in Romance-speaking and Eastern European countries. She wore it as the chosen name of a Carpathian phenomenon.