Emilia Eberle

Emilia Eberle
— Gymnast —
Full name	Gertrude Emilia Eberle
Country represented	Romania
Born	(1964-03-04) 4 March 1964 Arad, Romania
Discipline	Women's artistic gymnastics
Level	Senior International
Gym	National Training Centre
Head coach(es)	Béla Károlyi, Márta Károlyi
Retired	1983
Medal record Olympic Games 1980 Moscow Team 1980 Moscow Uneven Bars World Championships 1979 Fort Worth Team 1979 Fort Worth Floor Exercise 1978 Strasbourg Team 1978 Strasbourg Uneven Bars 1978 Strasbourg Balance Beam 1978 Strasbourg Floor Exercise 1979 Fort Worth Uneven Bars European Championships 1979 Copenhagen All-Around 1979 Copenhagen Uneven Bars 1979 Copenhagen Balance Beam World Cup 1979 Tokyo Uneven Bars 1979 Tokyo Balance Beam 1979 Tokyo All-Around 1979 Tokyo Floor Exercise

Gertrude Emilia Eberle (Romanian pronunciation: [eˈmili.a ˈeberle]; born 4 March 1964 in Arad, Romania) is a Romanian former gymnast of German-Hungarian descent.

Career

Eberle, a pupil of the famous husband-wife coaching team Béla Károlyi and Márta Károlyi before they defected from Romania to the United States, was the first female Romanian gymnastics star to succeed Nadia Comăneci. She was often in Comăneci's shadow because, for the greater part of Eberle's career, they competed together. Despite this, she made a name for herself, garnering 13 individual medals at the European/World/Olympic level. Most notable among her accomplishments was winning the floor exercise title at the 1979 Worlds ahead of her legendary contemporaries Nelli Kim and Maxi Gnauck, as well as earning a silver medal on uneven bars at the 1980 Olympics, where she was narrowly edged out of first place by Gnauck.

She was also on the gold-medal-winning team at the 1979 World Championships, held in Fort Worth, Texas. Despite a fall on the balance beam in the team optionals segment of the competition, her other scores were strong enough to keep the Romanian team in contention for the gold with the Soviet team. Ultimately, her compatriot Comăneci came back from an injury—having competed only in the compulsories segment of the team competition—and competed on beam, where she earned a very high score of 9.95, allowing the Romanians to drop Eberle's lower score and win the gold medal. It was a rare victory for the Romanians over the Soviet team, and one of the Soviets' only three World Championship or Olympic title losses between 1952, when a full women's gymnastics program was first held at the Olympic Games, and 1992, which was the last appearance of the unified Soviet team (under the guise of the Commonwealth of Independent States).

Although a strong gymnast all-around (she was the silver medalist in the all-around twice in 1979, at that year's World Cup and European Championships), Eberle was especially noted for her work on the uneven bars, where her routines varied greatly from year to year and even from competition to competition. She often included very quick and unusual transitions from one bar to the other.

Later life

Like the Károlyis, Comăneci, and others, Eberle left Romania, moving to Hungary in 1989 and to the United States in 1991. She is married and has a son, Roland, born in 1999. She coaches in California with a fellow expatriate Romanian, the gymnastics coach and choreographer Géza Poszár.

In November 2008, Eberle — who now goes by the name Trudi Kollar, incorporating her first name and her married last name — gave an interview to KCRA-TV claiming that while she was on the Romanian national team, Béla and Márta Károlyi regularly beat her and her teammates for mistakes they made in practice or competition. "In one word, I can say it was brutal," she told KCRA.

External links

• Whatever Happened To...
• List of competitive results at Gymn Forum