Hilda Múdra, legendary coach of Slovak figure skater Ondrej Nepela, has died at 95

Sylvia

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Obituary article in English:
Excerpts:
Slovak figure skating has lost one of its biggest personalities. Legendary figure skating coach Hilda Múdra died at the age of 95 on November 22.
Múdra was mostly known as the coach of Ondrej Nepela, the Olympic winner and multiple world champion. [...]
She became Nepela’s coach after his mother approached her. At the time, Nepela was a first-grader, and while bringing him to skate on the ice, his mother thought nobody was paying attention to him. She approached Múdra, bringing money, a jar of home-made jam, and asked her to pay more attention to her son.
“I returned the money to her, and kept the jam,” Múdra recalled, as quoted by the Denník N daily.
Eight years later, Nepela won his first medal – the bronze at the European championship in Bratislava, which he gave it as a present for her 40th birthday. He won altogether 10 gold medals during his career, including one from the 1972 Winter Olympic Games in Sapporo, three from the world championships, and five from the European championships.
Múdra was not only Nepela's coach, but something like his second mother. She called him her third child. They later became neighbours. Múdra even stood at Nepela’s death bed together with his mother in Mannheim in 1989, SITA reported.
Múdra’s charges included other top Slovak figure skaters, such as Marián Filc, the biggest Slovak rival of Nepela, as well as Agnesa Búřilová-Wlachovská, who later coached Jozef Sabovčík, another successful figure skater.
Múdra also coached Miroslav Šoška, Ľudmila Bezáková, Eva Križková-Ďurišinová, and successful ice dancer and coach Martin Skotnický. Moreover, she was active abroad, and coached Charlotta Walter from Switzerland and Sanda Dubravčić from Croatia.
She taught figure skating until old age, wearing skates till she was 80. She had to stop after an injury, SITA reported. Yet, she continued visiting figure skating competitions.
Múdra received several awards for her work, and even became an honorary member of the Slovak Olympic Committee in 2004.
In June 2021, she was awarded the Ľudovít Štúr Order 1st class from President Zuzana Čaputová for her achievements in sports and promoting Slovakia abroad.
From the SVK federation website - "Let us announce that the last farewell to Mrs. Hilda Mudra will be on Wednesday, December 1, 2021 at 11:00 am in the Bratislava Crematorium." http://www.kraso.sk/2021/11/posledna-rozlucka-s-hildou-mudrou/
 

AngieNikodinovLove

Frangi & Piazza & Paul & Hektor & Theo. Oh My! 😝
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Obituary article in English:
Excerpts:




From the SVK federation website - "Let us announce that the last farewell to Mrs. Hilda Mudra will be on Wednesday, December 1, 2021 at 11:00 am in the Bratislava Crematorium." http://www.kraso.sk/2021/11/posledna-rozlucka-s-hildou-mudrou/

What a great article and good read. Just makes you respect history.
 
S

SmallFairy

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Thank you Sylvia!
RIP Hilda, what an amazing woman. It’s sad, but she lived a long life.

I love watching old Nepela-videos, @floskate has some very nice ones. He’s in my opinion underrated, he was a great athlete with good triples, and if he was skating in another era, I’m sure he’d developed more artistically, he had a great personality. It’s so sad ge went so young. He didn’t get to coach for very long. I wonder what he might have accomplished.

I’m really happy he has a great ice rink and a Challenger named after him.
 

floskate

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Thank you Sylvia!
RIP Hilda, what an amazing woman. It’s sad, but she lived a long life.

I love watching old Nepela-videos, @floskate has some very nice ones. He’s in my opinion underrated, he was a great athlete with good triples, and if he was skating in another era, I’m sure he’d developed more artistically, he had a great personality. It’s so sad ge went so young. He didn’t get to coach for very long. I wonder what he might have accomplished.

I’m really happy he has a great ice rink and a Challenger named after him.
I agree. You have to remember that he started competing at the top level in 1964 where any type of musical interpretation for men was done using the skates and only the skates with hardly any exception. By his final season of competition in 1973, Toller and John were on the scene and had their own artistic visions and were pushing the sport in a totally different direction. He was caught between two eras and wrongly dismissed as the prototypical soviet satellite skating robot. Now we can see for ourselves how much better he was than some historians chose to remember.

RIP Mrs Mudra :(
 

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