Iolanda Balaș

Iolanda Balaș at the 1964 Olympic Games

Iolanda Balaș (born December 12, 1936 in Timișoara , † March 11, 2016 in Bucharest ) was a Romanian high jumper . She was a two-time Olympic champion and is considered one of the best high jumpers of all time.

Life

Balaş belonged to the Hungarian population in Romania ; this is why her name sometimes appears in Hungarian as Jolán Balázs.

In 1958 she married her Romanian-Hungarian trainer Ioan Soter (János Sőtér), and in 1968 they were married in church.

career

Balaș dominated international high jump competitions for a decade. Between 1957 and 1967 she won 150 competitions in a row and improved the world record a total of 14 times from 1.74 m to 1.91 m.

As the only high jumper, Balaş managed to become Olympic champion twice in a row. After finishing fifth at her Olympic premiere in Melbourne in 1956 , she distanced Jarosława Jóźwiakowska from Poland and Dorothy Shirley from Britain , who won the silver medal together, by 14 centimeters at the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome with 1.85 m . Four years later at the Tokyo Games she won by 1.90 m and was ten centimeters ahead of Michele Brown .

Iolanda Balaș on a Romanian postage stamp from 2004

She was also successful at European championships: While she had to be content with the silver medal in Bern in 1954 , she became European champion in Stockholm in 1958 and in Belgrade in 1962 . At the European Athletics Championships in 1966 , she was there, but admitted to being injured, which she also escaped the newly introduced gender check in sports . She underwent surgery before the 1968 Olympics , but did not compete in Mexico. It was previously suspected that she could also have male sexual characteristics ( intersexuality ).

Balaș still practiced the simple, traditional and not very economical shearing technique. On September 4, 1971, it was the Austrian Ilona Gusenbauer who improved the ten-year-old world record of Iolanda Balaş with 1.92 m in the parallel roll. A year later, Ulrike Meyfarth set the record with her Olympic victory in Munich and was the first woman to use the new flop technique.

Iolanda Balaş was president of the Romanian Athletics Federation from 1988 to 2005.

Awards

• On June 30, 1998, Iolanda Balaş was awarded the title of Honorary Citizen of Timişoara City .
• On April 14, 2003, the sports stadium Stadionul Iolanda Balaş Soter was named after her.
• In October 2012, Balaș was inducted into the IAAF Hall of Fame .
• 2016 Grand Officer of the Star of Romania (posthumous)

Web links

Commons : Iolanda Balaș  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Iolanda Balaș in the Sports-Reference database (English; archived from the original )

Footnotes

1. ^ Iulian Anghel: Iolanda Balaş a murit. Fosta atletă avea 79 de ani . Adevărul , March 11, 2016.
2. ↑ ^{a b c d} Stefan Lazar: An interesting marriage . In: Die Zeit 10/1968, March 8, 1968
3. ↑ SJ Mazdon: Iolanda Balas - 150 Wins in a Row . In: Track Stats 29, Issue 4, December 1991.
4. ↑ World record development high jump women on rekorde-im-sport.de, accessed on October 10, 2017
5. ↑ Iolanda Balaș in the Sports-Reference database (English; archived from the original )