Ioannis Melissanidis ( Greek Ιωάννης Μελισσανίδης ; born March 27 , 1977 , Munich , Germany ) - Greek gymnast , 1996 Olympic champion and 1994 European champion in floor exercises ; the first Greek gymnast - winner of the World Championship medal.
| Ioannis Melissanidis | |
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Biography
Melissanidis was born in Munich in a Greek family. When he was 2 years old, the family returned to Thessaloniki , which he considers his hometown. He began to do gymnastics and ballet at the age of 9. His parents initially did not support this idea, and according to Melissanidis, only a two-day refusal of food softened his parents and they took him to the gymnastics club in Sokolniki.
At the first European Junior Championships in 1991, he took a modest 18th place in the all-around, but won the bronze medal in floor exercises, ahead of future world champions Ivan Ivankov and Yordan Yovchev . Two years later, in 1993, at the Junior European Championships he won floor exercises and took third place in the vault.
In 1994, Melissanidis began to compete at an adult level. Having successfully started, he became the 1994 European champion in floor exercises, and at the World Cup , along with Briton Neil Thomas, shared the second place. Then he became the first Greek gymnast with a medal of the world championship in gymnastics. Successful 1994 was replaced by a series of failed performances in 1995 and 1996.
However, at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta , Melissanidis unexpectedly won the floor exercise competition for most, gaining 9,850 points. His gold medal was the first for Greece in gymnastics since 1896 . After the Olympics, Melissanidis continued to compete, winning the vault at the 1998 European Championships in St. Petersburg , and also represented Greece at the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney in vault and crossbar .
After completing his sports career, he began to actively participate in social and sports events. He is a supporter of Greenpeace and in 2003 publicly supported the Melina Mercury Foundation company on the return of Elgin marbles to Greece . He was one of the torchbearers at the opening ceremony of the 2004 Athens Summer Olympics .
Since 2008, he was a student at the American Academy of Dramatic Art in Los Angeles . In 2017, ANT1 chose him as a judge of the dance project “Do you think you can dance?”.
Links
- Profile (inaccessible link) on the website of the International Gymnastics Federation
- Ioannis Melissanidis - Olympic statistics at Sports-Reference.com
- Interview for www.tovima.gr (Greek)