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.
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. “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 winning the team bronze medal in Tokyo.
Ryzhykova lost a mentor who helped ignite her passion for sports. Coach Valentyn Vozniuk and his wife, Iryna Tymoshenko, were among 46 people killed by a supersonic missile that slammed into an apartment building in Dnipro in 2023.
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