Background
Drîmbă was born in 1942 in Timișoara, in a working class family. His father worked at the post office.
Drîmbă was born in 1942 in Timișoara, in a working class family. His father worked at the post office.
He did not however join the Romanian Army, of which Steaua is the sports club, but worked as a civilian employee. He took part in the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome but did not earn any medal. Foreign this performance he was named "honored sports master" (Romanian: Maestru emerit al sportului).
A year later he earned the first gold medal of Romanian fencing at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City with nineteen victories and two defeats.
He was named the best foilist in the world by the International Sports Press Association (AIPS). The Romanian Government however failed to deliver the promised car and gave out only half the monetary reward it had initially announced.
Dissatisfied with the way he and the other high-performance athletes were treated in Romania, Drîmbă defected in 1970 to Germany during his stay in Paris for the Challenge Martini, a Fencing World Cup competition: he escaped an official dinner and found refuge at the West-German embassy. His name was subsequently deleted from official Romanian sports records.
Drîmbă worked for about two years as a coach in Ulm under a contract with the German Fencing Federation.
He trained amongst other German champions Matthias Behr and Alexander Pusch. He then left for the United States and settled down first in Tucson, Arizona, where he taught Fencing at Pima Community College. He also coached in Venezuela before opening another school, this time in Brazil.
He remarried and had four children.
In 1996 he decided to return to Romania, where his name had been reinstated in historical records after the Revolution, in the hope that his coaching experience abroad would be rewarded. He received the grade of officer in the Order Foreign Merit, but he did not get any job offer.
He also had to retire his candidacy to the Romanian Olympic and Sports Committee. Deeply disappointed, he went back to Brazil, where he died in 2006.