On Romania’s National Day, 1 December 2025, in a sports hall in Druskininkai, Lithuania, an 18-year-old was tightening his powerlifting belt and getting ready for the most important moment of his career.
His name: Victor Antoine Bănuță. Category: -93 kg, juniors. Event: deadlift.
The 2025 European Sub-Junior & Junior Classic Powerlifting Championships, organised by the European Powerlifting Federation, brought together in Druskininkai the strongest juniors on the continent, in a competition held between 28 November and 7 December.
The event was transmited on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/live/9n2PPu_T-yo?si=k2ZL9sQthWi3El-G
Among the well-equipped delegations from Norway, Great Britain or Spain, Romania arrived with a small team: just a few athletes, with no pomp, no customised national team tracksuits. In the images, the contrast is obvious – but on the platform, the only differences that matter are those measured in kilos lifted.
In the deadlift event, Victor enters the contest with a clear strategy. The first attempt, 270 kg, has to be the safety lift that puts him firmly in the game. The second, 285 kg, equals the top weight he had previously hit in competition. The third lift is the all-in bet: 305 kg on the bar, everything or nothing. The bar breaks off the floor, rises steadily, is locked out at the top and the referees give it white lights. At that moment, the young Romanian surpasses his old personal record by 20 kg and secures the silver medal at the Europeans, being beaten only by Norwegian lifter Sander Higraff with 310 kg, on a podium completed by Spain’s Jose Luis Priego Tristell with 297.5 kg. The medal ceremony pictures, with Victor on the second step and the Norwegian in the centre, say everything about the balance of power: a heavily funded Nordic system and a Romanian junior coming from a small but extremely ambitious federation.
The performance in Druskininkai did not come out of nowhere. In 2025, at the National Classic and Equipped Powerlifting Championships in Alba Iulia, Victor Bănuță competed for CS Iron Team Ploiești and added two major milestones to his résumé: the national junior title in the 93 kg class and 3rd place among seniors in the same category, with a total of 680 kg lifted. The official senior certificate clearly records this total: 680 kg at 93 kg in the total event – numbers which, broken down by lifts, mean 260 kg in the squat, 140 kg in the bench press and 280 kg in the deadlift, figures also confirmed by his on-screen graphic during the EPF broadcast.
If we go further back, Bănuță’s name already appears in 2023 on the start lists of the National Classic Championships, in the 93 kg sub-junior 2 category, at that time representing the club Carbyne Strength. The competition’s technical documents show the year of birth 2007 and the 93 kg class – a sign that Victor was already in the national circuit before turning 16, getting used to the atmosphere of major contests and the pressure of the platform.
In just three years of official competition, his trajectory is spectacular: from promising junior in 2023, to national junior champion and senior medallist in 2025, then European vice-champion in the deadlift that same autumn. His profile sheet at the Europeans describes him simply: 18 years old, three years of competing, personal best squat 260 kg – figures which, correlated with his results at Nationals, confirm a steady evolution built with patience, not with reckless jumps.
Beyond the statistics, what impresses in Victor Bănuță is the way he combines sporting maturity with his biological age. At 18, you rarely see on the platform the calm with which he waits for his turn, the way he sticks to his routine – chalk, breathing, setting his hands on the bar – whether he has 260 kg on his back in the squat or 305 kg in the deadlift. In the pictures from Nationals, on the podium in Alba Iulia, he appears with a bunch of medals around his neck and a restrained smile – more like someone who knows he has only just ticked off the first important step, not like an athlete who “has reached the end of the road”.
The context in which he is emerging makes the story even stronger. Romanian powerlifting is a niche discipline, with limited budgets, far from the spotlight of football or heavily publicised Olympic sports. Although the Romanian Powerlifting Federation manages, year after year, to bring home European and World medals, resources remain scarce, and trips to major international competitions are often a joint effort by the federation, clubs and families.
In this setting, reaching European vice-champion status at only 18 takes on a double meaning. On the one hand, it validates his personal work – countless hours in the gym, structured training sessions, discipline in nutrition and recovery, giving up many pleasures typical of his age. On the other hand, it is proof that, even with limited resources, Romania can produce athletes who are competitive at international level, if their talent is discovered in time and given at least minimum support.
In the images from Druskininkai this contrast is crystal clear: the deadlift podium in the 93 kg juniors, with the Norwegian in full national-team tracksuit, the Spaniard in his federation’s official kit and Victor in a simple T-shirt, but with the silver medal around his neck and the Romanian tricolour next to his name on the broadcast graphics. Behind them, the other competitors look at their podium-finishing peers with a mixture of respect and envy, while on the screen, at the bottom, scrolls a short line of stats: “305.0 kg”. That’s all. No mention of how many hours in the gym those 305 kg represent, of the journey to Lithuania, or of the sacrifices behind them.
For Victor Bănuță, the future seems naturally to be flowing toward even greater performances. With a 680 kg total already validated at 93 kg and a deadlift that has broken the psychological barrier of 300 kg at just 18, the outlook for upcoming seasons – both at Europeans and, potentially, at Worlds – is wide open. If his technical and physical progress continues at the same pace, the transition from top junior to internationally competitive senior is only a matter of time and training volume, not of talent.
What remains essential in his story, however, is not just the numbers, but the message he sends to his generation. Without lecturing anyone at the microphone, Victor shows through his actions that at 18 you can choose a different path from that of comfort. You can decide you want to be among the best in Europe in a sport that offers neither big money nor instant fame. You can accept that this means investing time, energy, health and money into a passion that demands everything from you, but gives back moments like that podium in Lithuania – moments when, for a few seconds, Romania’s flag rises together with you.
For now, Victor Antoine Bănuță is “only” an 18-year-old junior with a European silver medal in the deadlift and four national titles checked off in 2025. But if you look closely at the numbers in his competition sheets, and at the way he went from 280 to 305 kg in a single season, you see more than that: you see the beginning of a career that can rewrite the standards of Romanian powerlifting. And, above all, you see a young man who has chosen to be serious and patriotic in the most concrete way possible for his age: by lifting more than his own bodyweight many times over – for himself, for his club and for Romania.
