Career
She belongs to the German minority in Romania. She is also an all around and floor world bronze medalist. Ruhn started gymnastics at Sport School Club Sibiu with coach Kristl Voiculescu and Nicolae Buzoianu.
Later she trained with the national team in Deva under coach Béla Károlyi.
Her first major international competition was the 1979 European Championships in Copenhagen where she placed fifth in the all-around final event. Melita did all the four events and contributed with a difficult and risky routine on the uneven bars.
She revealed for a newspaper that just before the Moscow Olympics she fractured her ankle. The ankle was put in a cast, and coach Károlyi took it off before the vault event.
She scored a 10 and the cast was placed back on her ankle.
The bronze on the uneven bars was a tie with Steffi Kraker and Maria Filatova. Ruhn retired from competitive gymnastics in 1982, when she was 17. She finished high school in her native Sibiu and left for Bucharest in 1984.
She went to the sports university there, while also competing for her home club of Computer Software Systems Sibiu for a short period.
After she graduated from college, she had a boyfriend, who emigrated to Germany with his family in 1988. They wanted to get married but the Romanian communist government only gave them their approval two years later, so she only managed to leave Romania in 1990.
In Germany she stayed for the first three months in a refugee camp near Nürnberg sharing the same room with six people. Then she was allowed to move in together with her boyfriend.
The former gymnast started working as a custodian.