Date of Birth: 
Place of Birth: Berlin
About Maxi Gnauck
- Maxi Gnauck (born 10 October 1964) is a retired artistic gymnast who represented East Germany.
- With a total of 27 medals at the Olympic Games, World Championships, World Cups, and European Championships she is considered one of the most successful woman gymnasts that Germany has ever produced.
- In 1980 she was selected East German Sportspersonality of the Year.Her parents were expecting a boy and they planned to name him Max so, when the baby turned out to be a girl, they simply added an 'i', creating an uncommon name for Germany.
- When Maxi was five, her mother took her to a gymnastics centre in their area.
- By age eight, Maxi had won her first medals at the Kreisspartakiade.
- When she was nine she changed her club to SC Dynamo Berlin, where she was coached by Jurgen Heritz.
- Considered one of the best uneven bars competitors of all time, Maxi was also an excellent tumbler.
- She was one of the first female gymnasts to perform a triple twist on floor.In April 1986, Maxi officially announced her retirement and began a four-year course in sports coaching at the University of Leipzig.
- In 1988 she was severely injured while sliding down a waterslide while working as an aide at a children's summer camp by the Baltic Sea.
- She broke her C5 vertebra and was nearly paralysed.
- Three vertebrae were later reinforced with a metal plate.Facing a strong competition after the reunification of East Germany and West Germany, she first took temporary coaching positions in South Africa and Great Britain, both for a few months in 1990.
- From 1993 until 2004 she worked as a full-time coach at the Harksheide Gymnastics Center in Norderstedt near Hamburg.
- Since 2005 she has worked at the Artistic and Apparatus Gymnastics Center (Kunst- und Gerätturnzentrum) at Liestal in Switzerland.
- In 2000, she was inducted into the International Gymnastics Hall of Fame.
- She is the first German gymnast to be awarded that honour.
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Mittelstädt, Rainer
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License: CC-BY-SA-3.0-DE
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