Ivana Trump life and biography

Ivana Trump is a former Olympic athlete, socialite, and fashion model noted for her marriage to mogul Donald Trump.

Ivana was born to Milos and Maria (née Francova) in Gottwaldov, Czechoslovakia, now Zlín, Czech Republic. From a very young age, her father nurtured and encouraged her skiing talent. In 1972, Ivana Zelnícková was selected as an alternate on the 1972 Czechoslovak Olympic Ski Team which allowed her several opportunities to travel outside the Communist Bloc. A year earlier, she married Austrian skier, Alfred Winklmayr, in order to obtain a foreign passport so that Communist leaders would not deem her a defector.

In the early 1970s she earned a master's degree in physical education from Charles University of Prague. In 1975 she left Czechoslovakia for Canada to be with a childhood friend, George Syrovatka, who owned a ski boutique there. For the following two years she lived in Montreal and worked as a model for some of Canada's top fur companies. In 1976 she divorced Winklmayr, left Syrovatka and moved to New York to promote the Montreal Olympics. It was in New York that she met Donald J. Trump, son of prominent real estate developer Fred Trump.

As Mrs. Trump, Ivana worked for many years as vice president of interior design for the Trump Organization. Following their much-publicized and ballyhooed divorce (an event that occupied an inordinate number of tabloid pages and headlines), she established two of her own companies, Ivana, Inc. and Ivana Haute Couture; graced numerous print advertisements for a plethora of brands; and significantly (like her ex-husband) moved into work as on-camera talent, as the subject of her own Lifetime network biography special, Intimate Portrait: Ivana Trump (2001) and the host of her own reality television special, Ivana Young Man on the Oxygen Channel. The program traveled behind the scenes to witness Trump guiding an affluent young socialite into marriage with the proper suitor.

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