Iuliana Dabija

Happy birthday to Moldova’s triple jumper Iuliana Dabija, who won her national title six weeks ago with a lifetime best.

On 1 July at the Dinamo stadium in Chișinău, Iuliana jumped 13.75m and won the Moldovan senior championship. It was the third season running she has improved her personal best: 13.21m at the World U20 Championships in Cali in 2022, 13.42m in qualifying at the World University Games in Bochum last year, and now 13.75m. She is ranked 61st in the world in the event, and World Athletics credits her with five national titles outdoors and four indoors.

She has been on the international circuit since she was a teenager. She took the bronze medal in the triple jump at the European Youth Olympic Festival in Baku in 2019 with 12.98m. She was seventh at the World U20 Championships in Cali. She was eighth at the World University Games in Bochum, one of only three Moldovan athletes on the team.

The triple jump is the most technically brutal event in the jumps programme. Three phases, each one landing more force through a single leg than the one before, and a runway that gives an athlete no room to correct anything once she has committed. Improving it by half a metre across three seasons, while the body absorbs that, is a serious piece of work.

She competes out of Bender, which makes a Moldovan national title in her name a story with more than one dimension to it, and she is a student as well as a champion, which is how she came to be in Bochum in the first place.

La mulți ani, Iuliana! Îți dorim multă sănătate, noi succese și împliniri pe măsură. Să-ți cânte Mulți ani trăiască azi. Noroc! 🎂🎁🎉🫶🫶🇲🇩