Early Years
Ivana was born to Miloš and Marie (née Francová) in Gottwaldov, Czechoslovakia, now Zlín, Czech Republic. From a very young age, her father nurtured and encouraged her skiing talent. In 1972, Ivana Zelníčková was selected as an alternate on the 1972 Czechoslovak Olympic Ski Team which allowed her several opportunities to travel outside the Communist Bloc. A year earlier, she married Austrian skier, Alfred Winklmayr, in order to obtain a foreign passport so that Communist leaders would not deem her a defector.
In the early 1970s she earned a master's degree in physical education from Charles University of Prague. In 1975 she left Czechoslovakia for Canada to be with a childhood friend, George Syrovatka, who owned a ski boutique there. For the following two years she lived in Montreal and worked as a model for some of Canada's top fur companies. In 1976 she divorced Winklmayr, left Syrovatka and moved to New York to promote the Montreal Olympics. It was in New York that she met Donald J. Trump, son of prominent real estate developer Fred Trump.
Read more about this topic: Ivana Trump
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or years:
“Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans—which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“To-morrow I will have finished four-score years. I have lived to rise from the most despised and hated woman in all the world of fifty years ago, until now it seems as if I am loved by you all. If this is true, then I am indeed satisfied.”
—Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906)