kyiv, Ukraine (AP) — For Ukrainian hurdler Anna Ryzhykova, every stride on the Olympic track in Paris will mean more than just the time she runs.
His competitions are no longer just individual fights, but a war on another front. His goal is not only to win gold, but also to draw the world’s attention to his country’s fight for survival against Russia.
“You’re not doing it for yourself anymore,” she said. “Winning a medal just for yourself, being a champion, achieving your ambitions, that’s inappropriate.”
But the broader war is making it increasingly difficult for Ukraine, once a post-Soviet sports powerhouse, to win those headline-grabbing medals, according to an Associated Press analysis.
Figure skater Oksana Baiul won Ukraine’s first Olympic gold medal at the 1994 Winter Games, just three years after the country declared independence. The medal ceremony in Lillehammer, Norway, was delayed while organizers searched for a recording of the Ukrainian anthem, and eventually managed to get one from the Ukrainian team.
Pole vault champion Sergei Bubka and the Klitschko boxing brothers Vitali and Wladimir, the 1996 Olympic super-heavyweight champion, are among the other athletes who have put the new nation on the sporting stage. At the Summer Games, Ukraine has outperformed all former Soviet and Eastern Bloc states except Russia and, in 2000, Romania. Until London 2012, it has always finished among the top 13 nations, ranked by total medals won.
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 launching its even deadlier full-scale invasion in 2022 to subjugate the entire country.
Ukraine won 11 medals at the 2016 Rio Olympics, its lowest total as an independent nation, and dropped to 22nd in the national rankings. Ukraine climbed to 16th at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, postponed due to the pandemic, but only one of its 19 medals was gold, another new record.
Part of the reason is that fighting costs lives and resources. Just as important is the psychological toll war places on athletes.
As they perfected their bodies and skills for Paris, they had to wrestle with their consciences. Athletes had to explain to themselves and to others why they continued to compete while soldiers were dying and lives were being shattered. Some emerged from the trip with their priorities reorganized and armed with a newfound motivation to fight, through sport, for the national cause.
“Our victories serve to draw attention to Ukraine,” Ryzhykova says.
She ran on the Ukrainian 400-meter relay team, which won bronze at the 2012 London Olympics, and placed 5th in her event in Tokyo, the 400-meter hurdles. Any medals she wins this summer will be for her country, in a very real sense.
“You only get attention when you win, when you perform, when you’re on the podium,” she said in an interview with AP. “The higher you are, the more attention you get.”
A sporting power on the verge of destruction
Since the war began in February 2022, more than 500 sports facilities have been destroyed. That year, Russian missiles hit the Lokomotiv sports center in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, depriving Ukrainian artistic swimmers of the training ground they used before winning team bronze in Tokyo. Mariupol’s “Neptune” aquatic center was bombed during the Russian siege of the devastated port city and the city is now occupied. This ruined diver Stanislav Oliferchyk’s plans to use it as a training base for the Paris Olympics.
High jumper Oleh Doroshchuk, 23, one of Ukraine’s top track and field hopes at the Paris Olympics, has learned to ignore the warning sirens blaring over his hometown of Kropyvnytskyi in central Ukraine so as not to interrupt his training. Yet after the particularly deadly Russian attacks that regularly hit the country, Doroshchuk says he has been forced to do some soul-searching, wondering whether it is morally right to “train” while other men defend the front lines.
“I think everyone has those thoughts,” he said. “Many of the people I know are fighting and some have been killed.”
Across Ukraine, air raids often derail training.
“We sit in the bomb shelter for an hour, then we go out for 15 minutes and start warming up and moving again. The alarm goes off again and we go back to the bomb shelter,” Ryzhykova says. So she trains mainly abroad.
Sport in mourning
Among the tens of thousands of dead and wounded in Ukraine are athletes, coaches and other members of sports organizations who together helped Ukraine establish itself as a sporting nation after breaking free from the old Soviet sports machine.
Some of the athletes killed could have had a chance to qualify for Paris. Some coaches had trained future generations.
Ryzhykova lost a mentor who helped spark her passion for the sport. Coach Valentyn Vozniuk and his wife, Iryna Tymoshenko, were among 46 people killed by a supersonic missile that crashed into an apartment building in Dnipro in 2023.
Vozniuk, who was 75, headed the Dnipro sports school where Ryzhykova took up athletics and where she still trains on her trips home.
“He was always very cheerful, a happy person who did everything to make sure the children came, had fun and stayed,” she remembers.
She fears that the war will accelerate the downward spiral of Ukrainian sport. “Few children come to train now, many have left,” she notes.
“There are times when depression and the feeling of not wanting to do anything sets in,” she said. “And when you’re in a training camp and you read the news about a massive rocket attack, you worry about everyone close to you.”
Facing Russia in Paris
In Paris, Ukrainian athletes will have to face another challenge: the possibility of crossing paths with competitors from Russia and their Belarusian ally.
The International Olympic Committee banned both nations from team sports in Paris, but did not give in to Ukrainian demands for their complete exclusion.
Russians and Belarusians who have successfully passed a two-stage selection process will be able to compete individually as neutral candidates. They must not have publicly supported the invasion or be affiliated with state military or security agencies.
The IOC said dozens of Russian and Belarusian athletes had qualified.
Ryzhykova finds it difficult to accept the prospect of face-to-face meetings.
“I can’t even imagine the anger,” she said. “How to hold back, how to look at them.”
His priority remains Ukraine and keeping his losses and sacrifices in the spotlight.
“We cannot remain without a position, stand aside, because we are opinion leaders. And we must be a support for our people,” says Ryzhykova.
“It will be a big challenge at these Olympics because there is no room for defeat or injuries,” she added. “It is difficult to manage, but it is both a source of motivation and responsibility.”
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Leicester reported from Paris.
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AP Olympics coverage: https://apnews.com/hub/2024-paris-olympic-games