As Ukraine Collects Medals in Paris, Its Sports Pipeline Is in Tatters
The Olympic medals have come in a flurry for Ukraine in recent days: golds at the track and on the fencing piste, a silver in gymnastics, two other bronzes.
“It’s a time to celebrate and think not about the war,” Mykhailo Kokhan, 23, a member of Ukraine’s national guard, said after winning a bronze in the men’s hammer throw on Sunday.
The Paris Games have been a welcome respite for a country where at least one bakery sells pastries shaped like anti-tank obstacles and there is now deep uncertainty over the nation’s sporting future.
Ukraine’s 140 Olympians have shown remarkable perseverance since Russia’s invasion in February 2022, preparing for the Paris Games either in other, safer nations, or at home to the grim soundtrack of air-raid alerts and missile attacks. Some high jumpers trained by flashlight during power outages. Another improvised his weight lifting by attaching car tires to a metal rod.
But no quick end to the war is evident. And once the Paris Games end on Sunday, Ukrainian officials will be left to try to repair and sustain the country’s ravaged sports system as they look ahead to participating in the Winter and Summer Olympics, as well as other international competitions, over the next decade.
“It’s hard to say a number, but we understand that Ukraine lost its next generation of athletes because many children left,” Vadym Gutzeit, 52, the president of the Ukrainian Olympic Committee, said in an interview in June in Kyiv.
Roughly 500 high-level current and former athletes and coaches have died in the fighting, according to Ukraine’s sports ministry and Olympic committee. At least 518 stadiums and training centers have been damaged or destroyed. Tens of thousands — or more — young athletes of various levels have been displaced inside and outside Ukraine.
The devastation has put severe pressure on the country’s sports system, challenges that were evident on a Friday in late June during a visit to the prominent Dnipro Sports College in east-central Ukraine. By midafternoon, the teenage students had sought cover in the school’s bomb shelter seven times because of air-raid alerts.
The alerts come so often in the beleaguered city that students who live full-time at the sports college — essentially a teenage Olympic academy — sleep in the sprawling shelter every night, seeking uninterrupted rest. They spend so much time there that the shelter has been upgraded with enhanced ventilation, the internet, television and school desks.
The students include Albina Musiienko, 16, one of four judo athletes who were injured slightly by flying glass in April when a missile — possibly shot down by Ukraine’s air defense system, according to the school’s director — hit the college. The explosion shattered school windows, blew out doors and effectively destroyed the facility’s kitchen.
“It was scary but not unexpected,” Musiienko said in a voice of weary teenage acceptance. “In our city, strikes happen often.”
The sports school in Dnipro has developed 49 Olympians, including Yaroslava Mahuchikh, who won the Olympic women’s high-jump competition on Sunday, and Oksana Baiul, the 1994 Olympic women’s figure skating champion. But so many top athletes have moved to other countries since the war began, the school has been forced to lower its entry standards, according to Oleh Derliuk, the academy’s director.
“They have better conditions elsewhere, so they think they have better results,” Mr. Derliuk said of the departed athletes. “It’s safer.”
Younger children use the Dnipro Sports College pool as much for therapy as for training. One mother said it helps to soothe her eight-year-old son, who screams during the night when he hears explosions. Another mother said her 10-year-old daughter gave up gymnastics because she lost confidence in the maneuvers at which she once excelled. She doesn’t want to give up swimming, too, her mother, Lyudmila Pysarenko, said.
“Our psychologist says it relieves stress for her,” Ms. Pysarenko said.
About 1,300 youth sports facilities have been kept operating to some extent in Ukraine, according to the sports ministry. This includes the Lokomotyv pool in the battered city of Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine.
Last fall and winter, the twins and artistic swimmers Maryna and Vladyslava Aleksiiva, 23, trained there for the Paris Olympics. The pool facility, which they shared with younger swimmers, often lacked heat and electricity. The blown-out windows were covered by boards, and swimmers sometimes had to flee to the bomb shelter in their dripping suits.
Visits in June to stadiums and training centers in towns outside of Kyiv made it clear that anything resembling a normal sporting culture no longer exists in Ukraine.
At the Stadium of Champions in Irpin, a leafy suburb that served as a last line of defense for Kyiv early in the fighting, 12 craters, apparently from mortar fire, still blacken the artificial turf. “We’re used to them and avoid them,” Kyrylo Koliada, 17, said as he trained alone on the field. Official games had not been played on it since Irpin was first destroyed and then liberated. “Some of my friends left for Poland and western Ukraine and never came back,” he said.
At Jubilee Stadium in Bucha, a town that became synonymous with Russian atrocities, the grass soccer field had been resodded but the large scoreboard remained scarred, along with many seats and the stadium walls.
Officials said that the war will have to end before Bucha and other cities can begin rebuilding their sports fields and courts, particularly because the country first will need schools, hospitals and factories.
On the grass behind one goal at the stadium, Olha Konopatska, 23, gave her brother, Nazar, 11, his first tennis lesson, using an advertising banner as a makeshift net.
“There is only one set of courts and they are private and expensive,” said Ms. Konopatska, a cardiology intern.
At the Boreks sports complex in Borodyanka, a town northwest of Kyiv where some buildings remain hollowed out, boxers aged 14 and 15 trained in an outdoor ring. They belong to a youth program affiliated with a Ukrainian Army unit, the Third Separate Assault Brigade.
Three or four times a week, the teenagers meet after school for activities like boxing, wrestling and first-aid lessons. Because adult soldiers from the brigade are protecting the country, the youth boxing coach is only 15 himself. Asked why the boxers trained outdoors, the coach, who would identify himself only as Donbas, his cadet call sign, said, “There is no place indoors in Borodyanka.”
Elite coaches are in short supply even in some Olympic-level sports. Ukraine’s top instructor of female shot-putters, Yuri Revenko, is 80. He said he has needed 18 surgeries and medical treatments to help improve his vision and hearing after being trapped in basements for more than a month in Mariupol, in southeastern Ukraine, during a Russian siege as the war began. His story was confirmed by numerous people, including another coach he credits with saving his life.
He now instructs Olha Golodna, 32, a two-time Olympian, from a wheelchair in Brovary, a suburb of Kyiv, where a Russian tank column was ambushed and halted early in the war.
Mr. Revenko, whose youngest son was killed in 2022 while trying to flee that Russian assault, said he stayed on the job for a simple reason: “Because it keeps me alive.”
Anastasia Kuznietsova contributed research.
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