A 21-year-old from Potomac is among the five women gymnasts selected to represent Team USA in the 2025 Maccabiah Games, known as the “Jewish Olympics,” this summer.
Gabrielle Nadler, a collegiate gymnast and senior at the State University of New York at Cortland, will be traveling to Israel for three weeks in July to compete in the open sports competition. The Maccabiah Games are an international multisport event held every four years, organized by the Maccabi World Union and open to Jewish athletes or Israeli athletes of any religion. This year, they are scheduled for July 8 to 22.
Nadler had been sitting on her bed in her room in January when she received the news: She would take part in the world’s third-largest sports competition.
“I got the email and my heart just started racing,” Nadler said. “I’m very excited.”
She applied to the 2025 Maccabiah Games in the fall of 2024 for the “once-in-a-lifetime experience.” To Nadler, competing in the games is more than an athletic venture; she said Judaism represents a significant part of her life.
“Especially in a post-Oct. 7 world, being a part of Jewish communities makes me feel a lot stronger and more connected, and I feel lucky that I’m able to represent my family and Jewish culture in Israel and continue doing gymnastics for just a little bit longer after college,” Nadler said.
This opportunity was born from nearly 13 years of practice. The Richard Montgomery High School alumna began taking gymnastics lessons at the age of 9, which is considered “very late for a gymnast,” according to her mother, Marcie Nadler — most professional gymnasts start practicing at 4 or 5.
“I progressed really quickly and was able to learn skills quickly,” Gabrielle Nadler said.
Within six months of her arrival, Gabrielle Nadler’s coaches at Dobre Gymnastics in Gaithersburg asked her to be on the pre-team, noting the 9-year-old’s burgeoning talent. She practiced there regularly four or five times a week, though it wasn’t always easy: “I had a lot of mental blocks growing up where I would get scared of skills, [such as bars], but I’ve been able to work past them.”
“When she was little, like when she was 10, I could see that [Gabrielle] was very motivated to do the right [technique],” Marcie Nadler said of her daughter. “She would take every correction and do it over and over till she learned the skill or perfected it, and that was pretty unusual for a 10-year-old to be so motivated.”
Marcie’s husband, Simon, took Gabrielle to see a gymnastics meet at the University of Maryland and the young athlete said, “I want to do that,” Marcie Nadler recalled.
Gabrielle continued for the next eight years, perfecting her areas of specialty: balance beam, floor routine and uneven bars. She earned two silver medals, one in 2015 as a Level 6 gymnast and the other on Level 7 in 2016. Gabrielle was also named the 2017 Level 7 State All-Around and Floor Exercise Champion.
Then the COVID pandemic shut down Dobre Gymnastics. She and her family decided to make the move to Frederick Gymnastics, where Marcie Nadler said the studio housed higher-level gymnasts, in 2020. At that point, Gabrielle knew she wanted to try to compete at the collegiate level.
“She was driven to really work to get to her goal,” Marcie Nadler said.
Marcie Nadler shuttled Gabrielle to and from practices for more than 10 hours a week for years — Gabrielle’s studio, Frederick Gymnastics, was an hour drive from the Nadlers’ Potomac home.
“It’s 22 hours of practice a week, five days a week,” Marcie Nadler said. “You have to really want it.”
Now a collegiate athlete, the Level 10 gymnast still practices four or five times a week with weekly competitions. She placed in the top six for floor routine in last year’s regional college gymnastics tournament.
“This has been the experience of a lifetime,” she said of her collegiate gymnastics career. “There’s ups and downs, just like any other sport, but I’m making memories that will last forever and have a sisterhood of teammates and a family here.”
The Maccabiah Games represent a “last hurrah” for Gabrielle.
“This is going to be the final punctuation mark on her career because she’s a senior in college,” Marcie Nadler said, adding that she’s proud of her daughter. “Really, after college, you can’t do gymnastics [professionally]. It’s not like joining a basketball league or soccer league as an adult. There’s really nothing.”
Gabrielle is most looking forward to traveling to Israel, where she’s been once on a family trip, and getting to know her fellow athletes — she knows one of the other four gymnasts representing Team USA, a Utica University gymnast who’s competed against Gabrielle in the past.
Four of the five gymnasts for Team USA are in a group chat together: “We’ve been talking a little; getting excited.”
Gabrielle doesn’t yet know which routines she’ll be asked to do in July, but is optimistic nonetheless. She will fly to Israel on July 1 and train with the team for the week before the Games begin.
“This is a great way to end my career,” she said.
