His competitions are no longer purely personal battles, but wars on a different front. His aim is not just to win a gold medal but also to draw global attention to his country’s fight for survival against Russia.
“You’re no longer doing it for yourself,” she says. “Winning medals just for yourself, becoming champion, realizing your ambitions – it’s unfair.”
The widespread war is making it harder for Ukraine, once a post-Soviet sports power, to score headline-grabbing medals, an Associated Press analysis finds.
Just three years after Ukraine declared independence, skater Oksana Byul won Ukraine’s first Olympic gold at the 1994 Winter Games. The medal ceremony in Lillehammer, Norway was delayed as organizers searched for a recording of Ukraine’s anthem, eventually securing one from the Ukrainian team.
Pole vault star Sergei Bubka and the boxing Klitschko brothers – Vitali and Wladimir, Olympic super-heavyweight champions in 1996 – were among other athletes who put the new nation on the sporting map. At the Summer Games, Ukraine outperformed every former Soviet or Eastern Bloc state – except Russia and Romania in 2000 – and, until London in 2012, always ranked among the top 13 nations based on total medals won.
Ukrainian performance began to decline after 2014. Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea that year followed eight years of armed conflict in eastern Ukraine, where Moscow backed armed separatists before launching an even deadlier full-scale invasion in 2022 to take over the entire country.
Ukraine’s haul of 11 medals at the 2016 Rio Games was its smallest as an independent nation and it fell to 22nd place in the country’s rankings. Ukraine reached 16th place at the pandemic-delayed Olympics in Tokyo in 2021, but just one of its 19 medals was gold — another new low.
Part of the explanation is that fighting takes lives and resources. Equally important is the psychological burden that war imposes on athletes.
While honing her body and skills for Paris, she has also battled her sanity. Athletes have to explain to themselves and others why they are still competing when soldiers are dying and lives are being ruined. Some are emerging from the trip with a reordering of their priorities and new inspiration to fight for the larger national interest through sports.
“Our victory is to draw attention to Ukraine,” says Ryzyakova.
She ran on Ukraine’s bronze medal-winning 400 m relay team at the London Olympics in 2012 and finished 5th in her specialty in the 400 m hurdles in Tokyo. Whatever medal she earns this summer, it will be for her country in the truest sense of the word.
“You only get attention when you win, when you perform, when you’re on the podium,” he said in an AP interview. “The taller you are, the more attention you attract.”
A sporting power is being destroyed
More than 500 sports facilities have been destroyed since the war began in February 2022. That was the year Russian missiles struck the Lokomotiv Sports Center in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, depriving Ukrainian artistic swimmers of the training venue they had used before leading the team to victory. Bronze medal in Tokyo. The gleaming “Neptune” aquatic center in Mariupol was bombed during the Russian siege of that devastated port city and the city is now under occupation. This ruined diver Stanislav Oliferchik’s plans to use Paris as his Olympic training base.
High jumper Oleh Doroshchuk, aged 23 and one of Ukraine’s most talented athletes in Olympic track and field in Paris, has learned to ignore the aid raid sirens ringing over his hometown of Kropyvnytskyi in central Ukraine in order to They should not interfere with his training. Still, especially after regular deadly Russian attacks on the country, Doroshuk says he has been forced to look inward, and questions whether it is morally right to ” “Just training” while others are protecting the front lines.
“I think everyone has those kinds of thoughts,” he said. “Many of the people I know are fighting, and some have been killed.”
Airstrikes throughout Ukraine often derail training.
“You sit in a bomb shelter for an hour, then come out for 15 minutes and start warming up and moving again. The alarm goes off again, and you go back to the bomb shelter,” Ryzyakova says. As a result she mostly trains abroad.
game in grief
Ukraine’s thousands of dead and injured include athletes, coaches and others from sports organizations who helped Ukraine stand on its own as a sporting nation after breaking free from the former Soviet sports machine.
Some of the athletes killed may have had a chance to qualify for Paris. Some coaches were nurturing future generations.
Ryzykova lost a mentor who helped ignite her passion for the sport. Coach Valentin Vozniuk and his wife, Irina Tymoshenko, were among the 46 people killed in 2023 by a supersonic missile that hit an apartment building in Dnipro.
Wozniuk, who was 75, headed the Dnipro Sports School, where Ryzykova started track and field and where she still trains on home visits.
She recalls, “He was always a very cheerful, happy-go-lucky guy who made every effort to bring the kids here, to have fun and to live.”
He worries that the war will hasten the decline of Ukrainian sports. “Right now some kids are coming for training, many have left,” she says.
“There’s a lot of depression and a feeling of not wanting to do anything,” she says. “And when you’re in a training camp and read the news about a big rocket attack, you start talking to all your relatives and Worried about loved ones.”
face russia in paris
In Paris, Ukrainian athletes will face another litmus test: the prospect of crossing paths with competitors from Russia and ally Belarus.
The International Olympic Committee banned both countries from the team games in Paris, but did not succumb to Ukrainian pleas for their complete boycott.
Instead, Russians and Belarusians who go through a two-step vetting process will compete individually as neutrals. They must not publicly support the invasion or be affiliated with the military or state security agencies.
The IOC has said dozens of Russian and Belarusian athletes qualify.
Ryzykova is struggling with the prospect of a head-to-head encounter.
“I can’t even imagine this anger,” she says. “How to stop myself, how to look at them.”
His priority is to keep Ukraine and its losses and sacrifices in the spotlight.
“We cannot live without a position, cannot live on the sidelines – because we are opinion leaders. And we have to be a support for our people,” Ryzykova says.
She adds, “It will be challenging in this Olympics because there is no scope for defeat or injury.” “It’s hard to deal with, but it’s both a motivation and a responsibility.”
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Leicester reported from Paris.
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AP Olympics coverage: https://apnews.com/hub/2024-paris-olympic-games
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