Ilana Kratysh

Kratysh's family origin is as dramatic as her athletic career. Her parents, Alexander and Galina, emigrated from St. Petersburg, and Galina went into labor during their flight to Israel; Ilana was born shortly after the plane landed.[1][2] She grew up in Haifa with an older brother, Yossi.[2]

From the age of five, Kratysh practiced judo under the guidance of her father, Alexander, who had been a judo coach in Russia and a Soviet judo medalist.[2] She trained in the sport for fifteen years, reaching fifth place at the European Cadet Championships and winning medals at international youth competitions.[2] Near the end of her mandatory service in the Israeli Navy, she sustained a serious injury to the fingers of her right hand and underwent several operations.[2] The injury proved especially costly for judo, where gripping is central to technique; concurrent rule changes in the sport also rendered some of her signature techniques illegal, accelerating her search for a new discipline.[2]

At age twenty, Kratysh accepted an invitation from the Israeli Wrestling Association to try wrestling — she had previously entered an Israeli wrestling competition once a year as recreation.[2] A third-place finish at an international competition in Latvia in 2013 convinced her that the sport could become her new calling.[2]

Because women's wrestling in Israel was underdeveloped, she moved to Lviv, Ukraine, at age twenty-one to train alongside world and European champions.[3][2] She spent roughly two years there before later training in Montreal with Jewish coach Victor Zilberman.[2] The early competitive results were difficult — she often lost despite sensing real progress in training — but the commitment paid off quickly.[2]

In 2013, Kratysh won silver at the European Wrestling Championships in Tbilisi in the 67-kilogram category, and claimed silver again in 2014 after moving to the Olympic 69-kilogram class.[2] That year, after her second European silver, she suffered a serious knee injury and required complex surgery that kept her sidelined for nine months.[2] She returned to training roughly one month before the 2015 European Games in Baku, where she won silver in the 69-kilogram final — losing 7–3 to Ukraine's Alina Stadnik — a result that also counted as a European Championship medal.[4]

One of the most striking episodes in Kratysh's wrestling career came at a 2013 Grand Prix event in Sassari, Italy. In a 67-kilogram semifinal, she defeated Egypt's Enas Moustafa Youssef Khourshid despite an allegation that the Egyptian wrestler bit her and refused to shake hands before or after the bout.[5] Kratysh went on to win the tournament, and her FILA world ranking rose to No. 2.[5] FILA President Nenad Lalovic announced that the Egyptian athlete was immediately suspended, preventing her from competing at the Mediterranean Games.[5]

Kratysh had failed to secure Olympic qualification at earlier opportunities, including the 2015 World Championships in Las Vegas, where she was eliminated in the round of sixteen.[6] The breakthrough came at the world Olympic qualifying tournament in Mongolia in April 2016, where she won gold and secured her place at the Rio Games — becoming the first Israeli woman ever to qualify for Olympic wrestling.[3][1]

She competed as part of Israel's 2016 Olympic delegation in Rio de Janeiro, which comprised 48 qualifying athletes across 16 events — the country's largest Olympic delegation at that time.[7] Ranked fifth in the world and entering as a medal contender, she faced Brazil's Gilda Maria De Oliveira in her first-round bout and lost 6–2.[8] The result was described as a major upset given her consistent European medal record and her world ranking.[8]

Before Rio, a Sport5 profile portrayed Kratysh as the central figure in Israeli wrestling and argued that a strong Olympic performance could attract funding, young participants, and public attention to the sport.[6] Her later leadership in sumo continued her work developing combat sports in Israel.[9]

By 2025, Kratysh had transitioned into sumo, serving as one of the leaders of Israel's Association for the Promotion and Development of Sumo.[9] She described herself as the first Israeli sumo athlete to win a medal, having claimed a European silver medal in the discipline.[10] The specific year, weight class, and location of that achievement were not detailed in available reports.[10]

In 2025, she participated in a sumo exhibition at Dizengoff Center in Tel Aviv during a Japan Month campaign, where two women and six men demonstrated sumo rituals and bouts before an audience of hundreds.[9] Kratysh said that the positive response from the audience exceeded her expectations, and that her organization hoped to develop Israeli sumo from a hobby into a more professional sport.[9]

Earlier in her career, in 2011, Kratysh had also won the Israeli edition of the television obstacle-course program Wipeout in a women's special, taking home a 30,000-shekel prize that she said she planned to put toward her Olympic dream.[1][2] At the time, her parents had been financing her athletic career while working two jobs.[2]

Sources count Kratysh's European wrestling silver medals differently. A 2016 profile describes four consecutive second-place finishes from 2013 through 2016, while another lists European Championship silvers in 2013, 2014, and 2016 and treats the 2015 Baku European Games silver separately, even though the wrestling event there also counted as a European Championship.[3][6] The 2013 Sassari biting claim remains an allegation from contemporary reporting rather than an independently adjudicated account of every detail.[5]