Amir Ganiel

Amir Ganiel was born in 1963 in Jerusalem

Amir Ganiel was born on January 6, 1963, in Jerusalem, the son of Uri and Dalia Ganiel. In the summer of 1970 he began training in California, where his family lived during his father's postdoctoral work. Back in Israel he trained in summers at the Weizmann Institute pool in Rehovot under Amos Hardy.

He won Israeli age group titles in 1973 and 1974 and joined a program for young athletes under coach Yosef Talki. In November 1974 a malignant growth was removed from his right shin, and he stopped training for about half a year. At age 13 he set an Israeli senior record in 1976.

Ganiel specialized in long distance freestyle and swam for Maccabi Tel Aviv. He competed at the 1978 World Championships in Berlin and won 8 Maccabiah medals, 2 of them gold, and 12 medals at the Eight Nations competition. He was chosen for the 1980 Moscow Olympics but did not compete because Israel joined the Western boycott.

After retiring from swimming, he studied medicine at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He worked as a chest and heart surgeon at Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba and at Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv. He died on May 14, 2018. His son Imri Ganiel is an Olympic swimmer for Israel.