Sara Simeoni

Sara Simeoni
nation	Italy
birthday	April 19, 1953
place of birth	Verona
size	178 cm
Weight	60 kg
Career
discipline	high jump
Best performance	2.01 m (1978)
Medal table
Olympic games 1 × 2 × 0 × European championships 1 × 0 × 0 × European Indoor Championships 4 × 0 × 0 ×

Sara Simeoni (born April 19, 1953 in Rivoli Veronese ) is a former Italian athlete . She was one of the best high jumpers in the world in the late 1970s and early 1980s . In 1980 she became Olympic champion in this discipline in Moscow .

Simeoni started with athletics as a child. At the end of the 1960s she was one of the first high jumpers to take over the Fosbury flop created by the American Dick Fosbury . Her trainer and later husband Erminio Azzaro , himself a high jumper, led her to her first Italian championship in 1970. 23 more followed by 1985.

Simeoni celebrated her first international success in 1974 at the European Championships in Rome , where she won the bronze medal. Two years later she won the silver medal at the Olympic Games in Montreal behind the world record holder Rosemarie Ackermann, who started for the GDR .

Simeoni reached the zenith of her performance in the 1978 season. In the run-up to the European Championships , she improved Ackermann's one-year-old world record by one centimeter to 2.01 meters at a sports festival in Brescia . She jumped the same height in the title fights in Prague and became European champion.

The greatest sporting success of her career came in 1980 when she became Olympic champion at the Olympic Games in Moscow with a height of 1.97 m. Two more international medals followed in 1982 with bronze at the European Championships and 1984 with silver at the Olympic Games in Los Angeles .

After the European Championships in 1986 , at which she was eliminated in the preliminary fight, Simeoni ended her career.

Awards

• Italy's Sportswoman of the Year ( La Gazzetta dello Sport ): 1978, 1980, 1981, 1984 and World Sportswoman of the Year 1978

Web links

Commons : Sara Simeoni  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Sara Simeoni in the Sports-Reference database (English; archived from the original )