Ilona Gusenbauer

Ilona Gusenbauer
nation	Austria
birthday	16th September 1947 (age 72)
place of birth	Gummersbach,  Germany
size	181 cm
Weight	67 kg
Career
discipline	high jump
Best performance	1.92 m
society	Union of Lower Austria Energy, ULC Wildschek Vienna
Trainer	Roland Gusenbauer
status	resigned
Medal table
Olympic games 0 × 0 × 1 × European championships 1 × 0 × 0 ×
Olympic games bronze Munich 1972 1.88 m  European championships gold Helsinki 1971 1.87 m
last change: March 23, 2018

Ilona Gusenbauer (born September 16, 1947 in Gummersbach near Cologne ; as Ilona Majdan ) is a former Austrian athlete . She is 16 times Austrian national champion (ten times national high jump champion and six times basketball champion with Union Firestone Vienna ) and was one of the best high jumpers in the world from the late 1960s.

Career

Ilona Majdan was born in 1947 as the daughter of a Rhinelander and a Viennese of Hungarian descent in Gummersbach near Cologne. In 1960, the 12-year-old tall girl was noticed at a school sports festival when she jumped the 1.45 meters with little technical knowledge.

In 1966 she became Austrian state champion in the high jump for the first time. She has been married to Roland Gusenbauer since 1967 and their daughter Ulla was born in 1968. She gained her first international experience in 1968 at the Olympic Games in Mexico City , when she reached eighth place seven months after the birth of her daughter with a height of 1.76 m. Two years later she won the bronze medal at the Universiade in Turin .

World record jump over 1.92 m (September 1971)

In the following season she reached the peak of her sporting success: On August 12, 1971, she was European champion with 1.87 m in Helsinki . In the sold-out Vienna Prater Stadium on September 4, at the sports press festival in 1971, she jumped the height of 1.92 m in the first attempt and thus improved the ten-year-old world record of the Romanian Iolanda Balaș by one centimeter.

Before the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich , she was forced to file a lawsuit against this because of the publication of an advertising image by a plastics company in order to maintain her amateur status. For the games themselves, Gusenbauer traveled to Munich as the favorite . In the final competition, however, she surprisingly had to admit defeat to 16-year-old Ulrike Meyfarth and in the end took third place with a skipped 1.88 m.

Ilona Gusenbauer ended her active career in 1976 as a result of a torn patellar tendon . She switched to basketball and became a six-time national champion with the women's team of Union Firestone Vienna . The mother of three now lives in Breitenfurt in the district of Mödling in Lower Austria .

Honors

• 1971 Election for Sportswoman of the Year in Austria - the honor took place on June 10, 1972 at the sports press festival in Vienna's Prater Stadium before the World Cup qualifying match between Austria and Sweden.
• In 1996 she received the Golden Merit of the Republic of Austria .
• In 2013 , Ilona Gusenbauer was honored for her life's work at the “Wiener Sportstars” award ceremony in the Vienna City Hall.

Web links

Commons : Ilona Gusenbauer  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Ilona Gusenbauer
2. ↑ "Sport is in my genes, you won't take it away". 13th September 2017.
3. ↑ An artist who maintains distance. 17th March 2013.
4. ↑ «Ilona didn't know anything about the advertising image» . In: Arbeiter-Zeitung . Vienna June 25, 1972, p. 12 ( berufer-zeitung.at - the open online archive - digitized).
5. ↑ From center right: “That was Ilona's feast day” . In: Arbeiter-Zeitung . Vienna June 11, 1972, p. 11 ( berufer-zeitung.at - the open online archive - digitized).
6. ↑ List of all decorations awarded by the Federal President for services to the Republic of Austria from 1952 (PDF file; 6.59 MB)
7. ↑ These are the Viennese sports stars 2013. ( Memento from March 24, 2018 in the Internet Archive ) September 5, 2013.