Maricica Puică
Romanian athletics competitor (born 1950)
Maricica Puică, née Luca, (born 29 July 1950) is a retired Romanian middle-distance runner. She is the 1984 Olympic champion in the 3,000 metres. One of the greatest female middle-distance runners of the 1980s, she also twice won the World Cross Country Championship (1982, 1984) and broke the world record for the mile in 1982.
Career
Puică was born in Iași, Romania and competed at the 1976 Montreal Olympics and the 1980 Moscow Olympics, where she finished seventh in the 1,500 m. In 1978, she placed fourth in the 3,000 m at the European Championships. In March 1982, she won the IAAF World Cross Country Championships. In August, she won a silver medal in the 3,000 m at the European Championships behind Svetlana Ulmasova. She also finished fourth in the 1,500 m final. A month later in September, she broke Mary Decker's world mile record of 4:18.08 with 4:17.44 in Rieti.
Puică missed the 1983 World Championships due to injury, but returned in early 1984 to win her second World Cross Country Championship title.
“Maricica Puică” enters the record as romanian athletics competitor (born 1950). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Maricica, Puică and Romanian can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q242184. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1950, 1984, 1982 and 1976.
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This entry incorporates text from “Maricica Puică” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.