Olympic athletes are rarely lacking in motivation, but Israel’s newest gold medalist – windsurfer Tom Reuveny – had no shortage of material to draw on during these Paris Olympics.
“There’s a big and strong Jewish community and I received a lot of positive messages,” he told CNN Sport, but he added that some of the messages were much darker in tone. “There’s a lot of threats on the Olympic team and it was a bit scary coming here. Unfortunately, I received a lot of bad messages online, one said ‘Prepare for your death!’”
Following the carnage of the 1972 Munich Olympics, in which 11 Israeli athletes and coaches were murdered, security has always been tight around the team. Tensions have been heightened further by Hamas’ October 7 terror attacks and Israel’s subsequent war in Gaza.
But as unsettling as the messages were, Reuveny says that he used them as fuel for his fire.
“I actually think that it gave me strength,” he explained. “I didn’t read all of them, but I read some of them and it did give me some motivation. I just wanted to prove to the haters that Israel is a strong country, and those messages are not going to bring me down.”
Up until this summer’s Olympics, Israel had only seen three of their athletes crowned as Olympic champions, but one of them was Reuveny’s windsurfing coach Gal Fridman – who became his nation’s first gold medalist in 2004 in Athens. Reuveny was only four years old at the time, but as he grew up, he became aware of the legend.
“Windsurfing has been a really big sport in Israel because of him,” the now-24-year-old explained. “And right now, 20 years later, when we walk in the airport or in the street, people recognize him and ask for pictures. It just shows how big of an idol he is to all the people in Israel.”
Reuveny wasn’t expected to medal in the Olympics this summer, but he says that he always believed in his own ability and Fridman’s advice might just have made all the difference.
“My coach told me that a lot of people are going to lose it under pressure,” he said. “He just kept telling me to stay calm.”
Reuveny’s teammate Sharon Kantor won silver in the women’s windsurfing and, with a total of six medals of the time of writing, this has been Israel’s most successful Olympics ever.
Days after climbing to the top of the podium in Marseille, Reuveny is now pinching himself in the Olympic Village in Paris.
“I’ve been looking up to gold medalist athletes all my life and dreaming about being like them,” he said. “No one thought I could actually win gold. It kind of sounds surreal when you call me an Olympic gold medalist, every few hours I check the medal to see if it’s real; I still have the medal and it’s not a dream. I think I made a pretty big impact to Israelis and the Jewish community all around the world.”
But Reuveny’s success is a droplet of joy amid the nightmare of Israel’s war in Gaza and the rising concerns of an even bigger regional conflagration. He says that some of his classmates and friends have been killed in the last year, some at the Nova music festival in the October 7 Hamas attacks and others who are Israeli soldiers. Ahead of the interview with CNN, Reuveny asked not to discuss his brother, but he had previously told Reuters that “he’s been a combat soldier since the war began.”
“It’s really sad and it’s a hard time for a lot of people in Israel and I’m not the only one who’s been affected,” Reuveny told CNN.
More than once, he expressed hopes that the fighting will soon stop.
On the eve of the Games, International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach described all the athletes at the Games as “peace ambassadors,” and the eight Palestinians in Paris have reportedly been warmly received.
Reuveny said he would like the opportunity to build bridges within the international sports community, but he says that so far nobody has reached out to him.
“I’m a bit shy as a person, so I’m kind of scared to reach out, but it’s something I am looking forward to try and do until I leave,” he said. “I see so many people around the Village that are from places that I’ve never been and from cultures that I don’t have much information about. We all are trying to achieve the same thing and we’re all trying to be human beings.
“I’m happy for the Palestinians that they could come here and compete, and I think it’s amazing that they could feel like rock stars. I would like to talk to one of them and sit down to a chat.”
Reuveny said that he would be more interested in talking about sports with a Palestinian athlete than politics, and he is confident they could find some common ground. Imagining how such a conversation might play out, Reuveny concluded with a scene that would be more valuable than any gold medal.
“I would just like to show him that we are all human beings and try and be nice and have an open conversation, to understand the other side of the story. I know that we might not agree on everything, like we saw on the 7th of October that there could be some bad people. But that’s everywhere, and I think we shouldn’t let the extremism take control over the good people. I think both sides are suffering right now, and I wish that one day it could all go away and that we could all live peacefully.”
