Maayan Davidovich

Davidovich was born on 21 May 1988.[1] Before the Beijing Games, she had competed in the older Mistral class and then moved into RS:X, representing Hapoel Tel Aviv's sailing center under coach Gur Steinberg.[7] As a junior, she won gold at the 2002 World Championships for cadets.[7]

Her route to senior elite competition was not straightforward. A 2011 profile described how she had nearly abandoned the sport because of financial difficulties, friction with the sailing association, and bureaucratic obstacles.[8] She had spent roughly two years training without a coach. Her return to training followed an offer of support from the Olympic Committee of Israel, while the Herzliya branch of Mizrahi Bank had also provided financial help.[8] She explained that she returned because windsurfing was the activity at which she was best, she believed she could succeed through her own efforts, and she wanted to fulfill herself after investing her life in the discipline.[8]

Davidovich qualified for the 2008 Beijing Olympics by finishing ninth at a competition in Palma in March 2008.[7] She joined an Israeli delegation of 43 athletes and competed in the women's Neil Pryde RS:X sailing event, finishing tenth overall.[3] The delegation included 20 women, the largest women's contingent in Israel's Olympic history at that time.[3]

Davidovich did not compete at the 2012 London Olympics after losing the Israeli berth to Lee Korzits.[1]

Davidovich earned the first world championship medal of her career at the 2013 RS:X World Championships in Buzios, Brazil.[9] She entered the medal race tied for second place overall, but a ninth-place finish in the final race dropped her to third, giving her bronze.[9] Her compatriot Lee Korzits won gold, producing the first windsurfing world-championship podium to feature two Israeli representatives.[6]

She repeated the bronze-medal result the following year at the 2014 World Championships in Santander, Spain.[10] Entering the medal race in second place, she finished seventh in that race and was overtaken at the last moment by Spain's Marina Alabau, ending third overall.[10] A 2015 report said that her consecutive bronzes positioned her to fill Israel's women's Olympic windsurfing place after Korzits withdrew from competition because of health problems.[5]

The cycle leading to Rio 2016 brought its own challenges. In 2014, after finishing fourteenth at a World Cup event in Palma, Davidovich said that the preceding period had been difficult because her training partner had retired from windsurfing, forcing her to seek a new coach.[11] At the 2016 Israeli RS:X Championships, she finished second behind Hadar Heller, losing the national title she had held the previous year, and wrote publicly that she intended to learn from her mistakes before the World Championships.[12]

Davidovich was 28 years old when she competed at the Rio Games as part of Israel's largest-ever Olympic delegation of 48 athletes across 16 events.[13][2] Her coach in Rio was Gal Fridman, himself an Olympic medalist in windsurfing, who had guided her into the medal race after she finished second in two of the final races of the opening series.[13]

During the qualifying series, Davidovich moved into fifth place overall after posting results of eleventh, fourth, and third in consecutive races, accumulating 35 points at that stage.[14] On the third day of competition she began the day in fifth, finished second in the first race of the day, then placed fifteenth and fourteenth in the next two, leaving her sixth overall with three races still to go before the medal race.[15]

She ultimately entered the medal race in fifth place, tied on points with the competitors ranked third and fourth.[4] Starting strongly, she reached the first marker in fourth place, only a few meters behind the leaders.[4] During the second leg she fell to sixth, 1 minute and 38 seconds behind the race leader, and ultimately placed ninth in the medal race to finish seventh overall.[4] She completed the race in 24 minutes and 46 seconds.[13] Speaking afterward, she said: "I'm bummed out, but I am trying not to take it too hard. I wanted to leave Rio in better style. Seventh place is not good enough, and I hope Tokyo will be different."[13]

Davidovich's two Olympic appearances and consecutive World Championship bronzes placed her among Israel's leading women's windsurfers of the RS:X era.[3][5] In 2017, the Olympic Committee of Israel selected her to carry Israel's flag at the opening ceremony of the 20th Maccabiah Games.[16] Her 2013 bronze also formed part of the first World Championship windsurfing podium to feature two Israelis, alongside Lee Korzits's gold.[6]