Ofir Netzer, who placed 4th in the vault final at the European Games earlier this year and was in the middle of preparation for the Olympics, tore her ACL on a bad landing on vault at the Israeli Championships last month. Netzer is currently preparing for surgery and is not sure whether she will come back to gymnastics after this. Previously, a knee injury did not allow her to compete at the 2015 Worlds and try to qualify to the Rio Olympics. Last year, after her personal coach passed away, she moved to Spain to train with Pedro Mir and was finally getting back to her pre-injury level and hoping to qualify to Tokyo at this year’s Worlds.
Netzer talked to One.co.il about the injury and
“I was just riding in a cab today, and the driver asked me how I was. So I told him. He listened and then said: “Wait, you’re only 23 and you’ve been through all that? It doesn’t make any sense”. And there I was, sitting in a cab, smiling and crying.”
Her first ACL injury happened in 2014. She had surgery but, at the 2014 European Championships, re-injured the same knee:
“During the first surgery, they put in a screw to hold my knee together and, when I was at the competition, I suddenly felt the screw coming out. It just flew from my knee and I felt it coming apart. I can’t say whether the surgery failed, but, apparently, something there wasn’t quite successful. That’s why I underwent another surgery and did all the rehabilitation again, which was longer, more patient, and more successful.”
She hoped to make it to Rio but was injured in 2015 and didn’t have a chance to go through the qualification process at Worlds:
“I don’t know if I was a sure candidate to get to Tokyo, but the injury did affect my qualification because the moment I got such an injury before the 2015 World Championships, I knew I didn’t really have a chance to get to Rio anymore. And now it happened to me again, a year before the Tokyo Olympics, only this time my chances of getting there were much greater. In my mind, I was already on my way to Tokyo. I just had to qualify in a month and a half at the World Championships and that would be it. And I think I’d have been able to do it without a problem, if not for this injury.”
In 2013, at Euros, she was the closest to a medal at a major competition. She had the third result in the vault final, however, two gymnasts were tied for the second place, and the bronze was not awarded:
“I had the third-best score at the competition and didn’t get a medal, I finished fourth because those are the rules of the European Championships in case of a tie. I don’t know why, but the fourth place always belongs to me. Last year, I competed at World Cups, in three of them, I finished fourth, and in the last one, I finished 9th, one place away from qualifying to the final. I don’t know what to say about it. I can only laugh about it.”
Israel does not have many gyms with elite programs and most of them are in or around Tel Aviv. People from other areas of the country rarely achieve national-team level results due to their lack of access to proper equipment. Netzer spent most of her gymnastics career at the same gym in the north of Israel, with the same coach, Boris Kinev. When she was 15, he was diagnosed with cancer. He recovered but cancer came back two years later. It came back again, after the second recovery. Netzer had to move to Hungary to train for a while but came back in 2017 to train with him again and to spend his last months together:
“We had a very strong bond. Our last competition together was the 2018 European Championships in Glasgow. He passed away two years later. We knew it was coming, even when I came back in those last months to work with him. When he couldn’t come to training, I went to visit him. It was tough. Before he passed away, I told him that I had scheduled a week of a trial run to train with a Spanish coach. He told me it was the right step and supported me. A week after he died, I flew to Spain. After the trial week, I left everything and moved to live in Palma de Mallorca. I met Pedro Mir there who became my coach and since then, I’ve made the most progress in my career.”
The Israeli Championships this year were held in memory of Boris Kinev. Netzer wanted to come to honor his memory:
“It was important for me to come to this competition. I wanted to compete here for him and I came here from Spain only for this.”
After the injury, she did not go back to Spain. She is currently staying with her sister in Tel Aviv and undergoing physical therapy at Assuta Reaction in order to prepare for the surgery. She’s having a hard time trying to process what happened and what to do next:
“I’m not sleeping at night. The thoughts keep circling on what was it and what happened. I’m traumatized. I might be the strongest girl you know but I have a limit, too. Right now I’m just trying to think about what I’m going to do at the practical level. Where to live, when to undergo surgery, how to do the rehabilitation. I am only thinking about that. Look, I don’t regret anything that I did along the way and I don’t blame anyone. The federation has been amazing and the Olympic committee helped me a lot. So far, I had money to live on and everyone supported me, but I don’t know what will happen from now on. I won’t sleep on the streets, I know that, but I hope that I’ll be able to recover as well as possible and that, first of all, I’ll be able to walk normally. That’s the first thing I want’ I just want to recover. I don’t know what happens next. I’ll get to the surgery, I’ll pass that, and then we’ll see. Sometimes, the recovery goes well, and sometimes it doesn’t. But, at the moment, nothing is clear.”
Her parents still live in the north of the country but she has to stay in Tel Aviv for the surgery and recovery. She says her last injury has been extremely hard on her parents:
“They’re devastated. I can’t think what my dad is going through now. Nobody knows what it’s like to grow up in the north and push his daughter to do what she loves, as he did. When I came to competitions in the center of the country, a lot of people raise an eyebrow and said: “ok, this is a girl from the north, she probably won’t last long.” But he didn’t give up. I don’t think anyone else went through what we went through. Every day, he drove me 50 minutes one way to the gym, but he never gave up. Even though I’ve always felt like an outsider, I turned into the strongest gymnast in the country, and I hope that this time, he won’t give up either.”
Netzer says the most upsetting thing is to imagine that this might be the end for her gymnastics career:
“The knees no longer hurt, they will be fine. No injuries hurt anymore. Only my heart hurts. But that’s not the way I will end my career. I don’t know what [the next competition] will be, but I want it. And I’ve already proven to myself and everyone else that I’m capable of doing it. Every athlete will tell you that their career is incomplete if they don’t compete at the Olympics. It’s the dream that will always stay with me, no matter what. [Gymnastics] is my life. Without it, I am nothing. I gave my body and my life just for that. I don’t see myself finishing my career now, not like that. Even if it means I will compete at the lowest level at the Israeli Championships, I will do it. Yes, I hoped that everything would be different and I know that it shouldn’t have happened now. I was the fittest I’ve ever been. I’ve had a crazy amount of improvement in the past months, I was getting ready to peak at the World Championships. I don’t know [what happened]. I wouldn’t change anything in my preparation, training, o competitions, except for the last second of this vault at the nationals. It was just bad luck.”
Photo: Israeli Olympic Committee
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She didn’t have the 3rd best score at Europeans, she had the 4th best score. Two gymnasts had an identical score.