Israeli High Jump Record Holder Danielle Frenkel Breiner Brings Her Lecture on Commitment and Winning to Audiences
Tel Aviv, Israel, November 1, 2026 – Danielle Frenkel Breiner, holder of Israel's women's high jump record and a mother of two, is now booking her lecture "Commitment to the Task and Striving for Victory". The talk is about what it takes to become the best in the country as a woman in elite sport, and to keep going when the body, or life, changes the plan.
Frenkel Breiner came to athletics late. As a teenager she turned down offers to train as a jumper and chose dance instead, at the Bat-Dor school. She entered her first Israeli championships at 19, during her army service, and won bronze without any training. Then came four years as the country's number two. At 22 she was told to retire: at 1.73 meters she was too short for a high jumper, and she had started too late.
At the 2010 Israeli championships she broke the national record twice, clearing 1.91 meters. "Only then did I understand how much I had learned, how much I had grown, and how much I had overcome," she said. In March 2011, in qualifying at the European Athletics Indoor Championships in Paris, she raised the record to 1.94 meters, which still stands. She finished fourth in the final, the best result ever by an Israeli woman at the time. A year earlier, in Barcelona, she had become the first Israeli woman to reach a European Championships high jump final. She was also the first Israeli woman to clear 1.90 meters, and she competed at the World Athletics Championships.
At her peak, a serious knee injury kept her out of the London 2012 Olympics and needed two operations. She switched her take-off leg and came back. She was Israeli champion four times: twice off her left leg, and twice more off her right.
Known as "The Gravity Bender", Frenkel Breiner also qualified as a lawyer. She is an ambassador for Athena, Israel's national project for women's sport, through which she lectures to girls across the country.
Her lecture draws on that path: discipline, rejection, injury and starting over, competing as a woman, and raising two children while still chasing the next height.
Lectures can be booked at [email protected] or through gravity-bender.com.
About Danielle Frenkel Breiner
Danielle Frenkel Breiner is an Israeli high jumper, four-time Israeli champion and holder of the Israeli women's high jump record (1.94 m, 2011). She is an ambassador for Athena, the national project for women's sport, and lectures on achievement in sport.