[4] Drîmbă became team world champion in 1967 along with Ștefan Ardeleanu, Iuliu Falb, Tănase Mureșanu and Mihai Țiu.

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.

The Romanian Government however failed to deliver the promised car and gave out only half the monetary reward it had initially announced.

[6] 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.

[5] He then left for the United States and settled down first in Tucson, Arizona, where he taught Fencing at Pima Community College.

[6] 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.