'Nina Is An Athlete' Offers A Portrait of Israeli Paralympic Badminton Champion

One of the earliest conversations we hear in Nina Is An Athlete — director Ravit Markus’ portrait of Israeli Paralympic badminton champion Nina Gorodetzky — is about the way Nina’s husband, Dor, loves her. We see a conversation between Gorodetzky and her coaching team, led by Leon Pugach, who says that he assumes that any man married to a disabled woman must be either “the salt of the earth” or a “pervert.” “I don’t think I’d even go near such a situation,” he says to the sounds of agreeable laughter from the rest of the team, including Gorodetzky. 

Nina Is An Athlete is an archive of a disabled athlete past her athletic prime (“she’s pushing 40,” says Pugach, who is much older and still coaching), holding onto the end of her badminton career as she navigates motherhood, new pregnancy, the COVID lockdown, and many other setbacks that would threaten to flatten someone with less tenacity. Gorodetzky works hard, competes hard, and speaks as candidly about her car accident paralysis at 17 as she does about her Olympic outlook. Her story is not the most digestible version of a paralympian’s life; Nine Is An Athlete ends up exploring the emotional limitations non-disabled people have around caring for loved ones with a disability, and the ways those emotional limitations persist when a person becomes disabled unexpectedly. Nina struggles with self-compassion, and it seems like everyone else wants to humble her to protect her. 

There are full scenes of Nina Is An Athlete where Gorodetzky’s coaching team talks about her and her disability like she were not in the room, full scenes where the team discusses her competitive outlook as if she were unaware of her own physical limitations. She fights to defend herself and her dignity, and tells stories that are both evidence of her personal drive and of the world working against her. As she describes her life in the hospital post-paralysis, she says she had an outburst when a doctor could not provide an updated diagnosis. She was assigned a psychiatrist after that outburst, as if frustration with a medical team after a huge physical trauma is clinical. Stories like this emphasize Gorodetzky’s power and verve while highlighting the ways medical caretakers underestimate and dehumanize even recently disabled people. 

And it’s not just her team and her doctors who try to extinguish Gorodetzky’s flame with containment. Her family — who clearly show up for her however they’re able, with her husband and mom stepping up to take care of their young children when Nina goes off to competition — likes to prepare her for the worst as she is trying to prepare herself to do her best. When she goes to visit her parents to tell them she’s qualified for the Tokyo Paralympics, her mother’s response is: “Good luck. It won’t be gold, but good luck.” Sport is mental as much as it’s physical, and Nina fails to place in Tokyo and beyond. Maybe she had aged out; maybe her participation in the Olympics mere months after giving birth to her second child changed her competitive outcomes; maybe she never had much of a chance at making gold. But warning her in advance about her own performance, something Nina is aware of more than anyone else can possibly be, certainly does not improve her odds. 

Her family tries to protect her in this pre-emptive, projective way in more areas than just her athletic career. Gorodetzky tells a story about how her brother warned her before she married Dor that a man like that would never marry her. Dor, for his part, seems like the most supportive and understanding person in Gorodetzky’s life. He is “the salt of the earth” in that gross metaphor Leon named early in the film: a person who loves her not in spite of anything, but for exactly who she is. It’s telling that, among her family and coaches and friends, no one seems happy to be proven wrong about Dor’s intentions. They just warn her about how she will fail at the next thing. 

It’s also notable that much of the hardship Gorodetzky experienced pre-disability centered around her identity as a Russian immigrant to Israel. She was called “Russian whore” as a child, she explains, because Israelis associated Soviet immigrants with sex work. These micro cruelties exist against a backdrop of macro cruelties common to Israeli culture, based in identity stratification that places certain kinds of people at the top, powerful, and certain kinds of people at the bottom, powerless. That applies to disabled people, that applies to post-1948 immigrants, and that applies most destructively to Palestinians. This is a documentary about a person trying to exist within an unjust system; that same unjust system is wielded time and time again to minimize, separate, and murder Palestinians mere miles from Gorodetzky’s home. 

Nina Is An Athlete succeeds at profiling an athlete struggling with how to end a career on her own terms. Gorodetzky is a complex central character and is always interesting to watch. Markus stays out of her way and shows us something very honest yet unpleasant. It is hard to watch, and it is ultimately a compelling window into prejudice more than it is a compelling window into the life of a Paralympian.