At the Paris Olympics, this will no longer be personal for Ukrainian athletes. This time it’s war

KYIV, Ukraine – For Ukrainian runner Anna Ryzhykova, each step on the Paris Olympic track will have meaning far beyond the time she sets.

Their competitions are no longer a strictly individual battle, but a war on a different front. Your goal is not just gold, but also to attract global attention to your country’s fight for survival against Russia.

“You’re not doing it for yourself anymore,” she says. “Winning a medal just for yourself, being a champion, realizing your ambitions – it’s inappropriate.”

But the broader war is making it increasingly difficult for Ukraine, once a post-Soviet sporting powerhouse, to win those headline-grabbing medals, an Associated Press analysis found.

Skater Oksana Baiul won Ukraine’s first Olympic gold, at the 1994 Winter Games, just three years after Ukraine declared independence. The medal ceremony in Lillehammer, Norway, was postponed while organizers sought a recording of the Ukrainian anthem, finally guaranteeing one for the Ukrainian team.

Pole vault star Sergei Bubka and the Klitschko boxing brothers – Vitali and Wladimir, the 1996 Olympic super heavyweight champion – were among other athletes who put the new nation on the sporting map. At the Summer Olympics, Ukraine outperformed all former Soviet or Eastern bloc states – except Russia and, in 2000, Romania – and until London in 2012, always finished in the top 13 countries, ranked by total medals. conquered.

Ukraine’s performance began to decline after 2014. Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea that year was followed by eight years of armed conflict in eastern Ukraine, where Moscow backed armed separatists before unleashing its even more deadly large-scale invasion in 2022 to subjugate the entire country.

Ukraine’s 11 medal haul at the 2016 Rio Games was its fewest as an independent nation and it dropped to 22nd in the country’s rankings. Ukraine recovered to 16th place at the pandemic-postponed 2021 Tokyo Olympics, but only one of its 19 medals was gold – another new low.

Part of the explanation is that the fight demands lives and resources. Equally important is the psychological toll that war places on athletes.

As they honed their bodies and skills for Paris, they struggled with their consciences. Athletes have had to explain to themselves and others why they still compete when soldiers die and lives are destroyed. Some are emerging from this journey with their priorities reordered and equipped with a new motivation to fight, through sport, for the broader national cause.

“Our victories serve to draw attention to Ukraine,” says Ryzhykova.

She ran on the bronze medal-winning Ukrainian 400-meter relay team at the 2012 London Olympics, and placed 5th in her specialty in Tokyo, the 400-meter hurdles. Any medals she wins this summer will be for her country in a very real sense.

“Attention is only drawn to you when you win, when you perform, when you are on the podium,” she said in an interview with AP. “The higher you are, the more attention you attract.”

More than 500 sports facilities have been destroyed since the start of the war in February 2022. That was the year Russian missiles hit the Lokomotiv sports center in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, depriving Ukrainian artistic swimmers of their training facility. that they wore before the team beat them. bronze medal in Tokyo. The gleaming “Neptune” aquatic center in Mariupol was bombed during the Russian siege of that devastated port city and now the city is under occupation. This ruined diver Stanislav Oliferchyk’s plans to use it as an Olympic training base in Paris.

High jumper Oleh Doroshchuk, 23, one of Ukraine’s biggest prospects in Olympic athletics in Paris, has learned to ignore the distress sirens ringing in his hometown of Kropyvnytskyi, in central Ukraine, so they don’t interrupt his training. . Still, after particularly deadly Russian attacks regularly hit the country, Doroschuk says he has been forced to look inward, questioning whether it is morally right for him to be “just training” when other men are defending the lines of front.

“I think everyone has that kind of thinking,” he said. “Many people among those I know are fighting and some have been killed.”

Across Ukraine, airstrikes often make training impossible.

“You sit in the bomb shelter for an hour, then go outside for 15 minutes and start to warm up and move around again. The alarm goes off again and you go back to the bomb shelter,” says Ryzhykova. As a result, she mainly trains abroad.

Among the many tens of thousands of dead and injured in Ukraine are athletes, coaches and others from sports organizations that together helped Ukraine remain independent as a sports nation after breaking free from the former Soviet sports machine.

Some of the dead athletes may have had a chance to qualify for Paris. Some of the coaches had been nurturing future generations.

Ryzhykova lost a mentor who helped spark her passion for sports. Coach Valentyn Vozniuk and his wife, Iryna Tymoshenko, were among 46 people killed by a supersonic missile that hit an apartment building in Dnipro in 2023.

Vozniuk, 75, ran the Dnipro sports school, where Ryzhykova started athletics and where she still trains on trips home.

“He was always very happy, a happy person who did everything he could to make sure the children arrived, had fun and stayed,” she remembers.

She fears the war will accelerate a downward spiral for Ukrainian sport. “Not many kids are coming for training now, many have already left,” she notes.

“There are times when depression and the feeling of not wanting to do anything set in,” she says. “And when you’re at a training camp and you read the news about a massive rocket attack, you worry about all your relatives and loved ones.”

In Paris, Ukrainian athletes will face another ordeal: the likelihood of crossing paths with competitors from Russia and ally Belarus.

The International Olympic Committee banned the two nations from participating in team sports in Paris, but did not give in to Ukrainian calls for their total exclusion.

Instead, Russians and Belarusians who pass a two-step verification procedure will compete individually as neutrals. They must not have publicly supported the invasion or be affiliated with military or state security agencies.

The IOC said dozens of Russian and Belarusian athletes qualified.

Ryzhykova struggles with the prospect of face-to-face meetings.

“I can’t even imagine this anger,” she says. “How to hold back, how to look at them.”

His priority remains Ukraine and keeping its losses and sacrifices in the spotlight.

“We cannot remain without a position, remain on the sidelines — because we are opinion makers. And we have to be a support for our people,” says Ryzhykova.

“It will be a challenge at these Olympics because there is no room for defeat or injuries,” she adds. “It’s hard to deal with, but it’s both motivation and responsibility.”

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Leicester reported from Paris.

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