At the same time that Yaroslava Mahuchikh is flying to gold in Paris, wowing the stadium, Volodymyr Zelensky, her president and the president of all Ukrainians, announces that the F16 fighters promised by Europe have begun to land in kyiv, and both pieces of news will surely make the front pages of his country, broken by the Russian invasion and destroyed by the war that is now in its third year. The reality of a world in conflict always prevails over the Olympic ideal of peace and friendship between peoples, which in Paris punishes the invading Russians – already Maria Lasitskene, who defeated her in Tokyo – and their Belarusian allies, forbidding their flag and anthem, and celebrates the victory of Mahuchikh, the heroine of the high jump.
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Less than a month ago, in Paris, on the banks of the Seine, but at the Charléty stadium, the new Olympic champion broke one of the most respected records in athletics, the 2.09m that the Bulgarian Stefka Kostadinova jumped in 1987, and 37 years later was considered inaccessible. Combining her school technique and magnificent running pace with an increase in speed and strength that allows her to jump further from the bar, her back pulled her centre of gravity towards the sky in a perfect parabola and she cleared 2.10m.
In her eyes, made up as always when she competes since February 24, 2022, the blue and yellow colors of her Ukrainian flag, her hair braided in childish braids that hang down, in her words of thanks, her patriotic and political speech. “I dedicate this record to my country, like all my jumps in recent years. We will never give up. We will fight until the end,” she said after hugging and crying with her coach, Tatiana Stepanova. “At home, people have their daily worries, of course, but I know that many people follow my performances just the same. Many soldiers wrote to me after my victory at the European Championships in Rome to thank me for the emotions they had felt. That was when I put the word Ukraine in the athletics books.”
She won gold on the purple vault at the Stade de France with a certain amount of drama and a pinch of tension, winning the head-to-head with the studious Australian Nicola Olyslagers at 2.00m, to which the competition had been reduced since 1.98m. She won tied for height, but with two fewer nulls.
With the bronze medal shared between Australia’s Eleanor Patterson, world champion in 2022, and the other Ukrainian in the competition, Iryna Gerashchenko, tied at 1.95m, Olyslagers’ enthusiasm, who renews herself after each takedown by writing down her feelings and analysis in her diary, and rereading them to motivate herself, led her to clear two metres on her third attempt. Mahuchikh, with a clean slate until then, had to refocus to jump 2.02m. Fortunately, the Australian jumped ahead of her. She failed on all three attempts. That saved the new Olympic champion, who could not handle the height on her first two attempts, nor the 2.04m she tried to give to the devoted fans. The adrenaline of the competition had flown, replaced by nerves and imprecision at the key moment.
Mahuchikh is a natural jumper. A unique and smooth talent. Her jumps are always the same, calibrated and perfect. She is perfection. Prodigious from a very young age, runner-up in the world championship in 2019, at the age of 17, bronze medallist in Tokyo in 2021, runner-up in the world championship again in 2022 and world champion last summer in Budapest, the 22-year-old Mahuchikh only needed the Olympic crown to complete a unique list of achievements built almost from exile.
“On February 24, 2022, at 4:30 a.m., I woke up in my apartment to the terrible sounds of explosions, artillery fire and cannon fire,” she said in March 2022 after being crowned world indoor champion in Belgrade a few days after the invasion and her escape from her apartment in Dnipro. Based in Estonia or Belgium during the preparation and the season, the Ukrainian will not return home for several months. “I have not been to Dnipro since last October. There are always explosions and sirens warning people of air raids, but that is my home,” she says.
The gold medal won by the martyred Dnipro jumper is Ukraine’s fourth medal in Paris. The previous medals were in combat sports for soldier athletes: the gold medal won by the women’s sabre team, the silver medal won by a rifle shooter and the bronze medal won by a female sabre fighter. The only thing missing was the fighter plane, the flying Ukraine.
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