Was Ivana Trump An Olympic Skier? Everything We Know About Her Skiing Career

Amid the 2024 Olympic Games, Donald Trump Jr. took to X, formerly known as Twitter, to weigh in on the controversial opening ceremony. Don Jr. started out his tweet by claiming that his mother, the late Ivana Trump, who continues to make waves long after her tragic death in 2022, was an Olympic athlete who competed as part of the Czech national ski team. This rather dubious assertion had pundits doing a double-take, while others' fact-checking quickly revealed that, no, Ivana never made it to the Olympics. Frequent Trump family critic Ron Filipkowski replied to Don Jr.'s tweet to disprove his claim, noting, "Donald Trump claimed in 'The Art of the Deal' that Ivana competed in the 1972 Games for Czech. Never happened. She was never on the Czech Olympic Team. Just pure fiction." 

Donald's first wife reportedly started the rumor herself when she posited that she had attended the 1972 Winter Olympics as an alternate for her home country. The former president's public reiteration of these claims in his 1987 bestseller led to the Secretary General of the Czechoslovakia Olympic Committee setting the record straight after receiving multiple calls from reporters. "Who is this Ivana woman, and why do people keep calling us about her? We have searched so many times and have consulted many, many people, and there is no such girl in our records," he once informed Spy magazine.

The truth about Ivana Trump is that she was actually a pretty decent skier, despite not making it to the Olympics as she once claimed. Trump first hit the slopes when she was only four, practicing her skills in the Carpathian foothills near her family's country house. Trump further developed her skills when she traveled to the Italian Alps to attend a ski camp. All this practice paid off, and eventually she grew into a competent athlete who made the Czech junior national ski team. This allowed Trump plenty of travel opportunities and exciting new experiences in her younger years. 

Trump's mother, Marie Zelníčková, has previously spoken out about her daughter's passion and desire to be successful in every area of her life. "She was always ambitious, and her father treated her like a boy," Zelníčková recalled, per Newsweek. While Trump appears to have been a dedicated athlete, the Czech team did not have the best trainers, which is likely one of the reasons she never reached her full potential. She went on to study in Prague after leaving school, and it was there that Trump met her first husband, Alfred Winklmayr, who just happened to be an Austrian ski instructor.

Ivana Trump was nothing if not innovative, and she used her love for the slopes to escape the Soviet Union, marrying Austrian ski instructor Alfred Winklmayr as a means to acquire an Austrian passport. Crucially, this allowed Ivana to leave Czechoslovakia legally in 1972. She and Winklmayr made their way to Canada, but the marriage was a purely transactional one, and was never consummated. The couple went their separate ways in 1973, and Ivana later referred to the union as a "Cold War marriage," (via BBC).

She made a life for herself in Montreal, where Ivana eventually landed her first modeling gig. Before Ivana's big break, though, she studied English at the McGill University while also offering skiing lessons. Ivana's life changed drastically when she was selected as a model for the 1976 Winter Olympics, after which Ivana made the move to New York City, which is where she ran into Donald Trump, who was kickstarting his real estate career at the time. The two quickly hit it off, and just one year later, they were married.

Ivana might not have made it to the Olympics, but she did manage to become one of the most well-known women in high society. And skiing remained a passion, with Ivana revealing in her memoir "Raising Trump" that when Eric Trump refused to vacation in Aspen and, crucially, ski there, which he reportedly despised, his mother sternly notified him, "'You will go to Aspen, and you will ski.' Discussion over."