Ukraine’s athletes battle for survival at Paris Olympics

KYIV, Ukraine — For Ukrainian hurdler Anna Ryzhykova, each stride on the Paris Olympic track will have meaning far beyond the time she clocks.

Her competitions are no longer strictly an individual battle, but war on a different front. Her goal is not just gold, but also to rivet global attention on her 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 sports power, to get those headline-capturing 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 delayed while organizers hunted for a recording of Ukraine’s anthem, finally securing one from the Ukrainian team.

Pole vault star Sergei Bubka and the boxing Klitschko brothers — Vitali and Wladimir, the Olympic super-heavyweight champion in 1996 — were among other athletes who put the new nation on sport’s map. At the Summer Games, Ukraine outperformed every former Soviet or Eastern bloc state — except Russia and, in 2000, Romania — and through to London in 2012, always finished among the top 13 nations, ranked by total medals won.

Ukrainian performances began dipping 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 deadlier full-scale invasion in 2022 to subdue the whole country.

Ukraine’s haul of 11 medals at the 2016 Rio Games was its smallest as an independent nation and it tumbled to a low of 22nd in the country rankings. Ukraine recovered to 16th 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. Just as important is the psychological burden the war imposes on athletes.

While honing their bodies and skills for Paris, they have wrestled with their consciences. Athletes have had to explain to themselves and others why they are still competing when soldiers are dying and lives being ripped apart. Some are emerging from the journey with their priorities reordered and armed with new motivation to fight, through sport, for the broader national cause.

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

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

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

More than 500 sports facilities have been destroyed since the war began 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 the training venue they used before