Despite the ongoing war, Ukrainian athletes have not forgotten about the 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Paris. The scenes inside the Ivan Piddubnyi Olympic College are quite remarkable where Ukrainian athletes continue training for the Games in the midst of an ongoing war.
The Piddubny Olympic College training centre is like one of those Soviet-era buildings – dull, rectangular and unremarkable – and is located off a quiet residential street. The athletes don’t care about the grim predictions which say that war with neighbour Russia will drag onto 2024.
Ukraine has won 148 medals in the Olympics – 38 of those are gold medals – and the athletes are determined to add to that total. It should be noted that Ukraine became an independent country in 1991 and participated in its first Olympics as an independent nation for the first time at the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway.
Ukrainians on a daily basis face the consequences of the ongoing war on the country by neighbour Russia. Missile and rocket strikes on Kyiv’s infrastructure have only intensified but this has not deterred Ukrainian athletes from their targets.
“Our rules require athletes to go into shelter every time the air raid sirens sound,” Natalia Olksiivna Lupu who manages the training at the centre tells CNN-News18.
“No matter if they are in their training gear, or in the midst of a training session. They have to go into the shelter,” Lupu added, pointing out that these rules are strictly enforced.
If one considers that air raid sirens are sounded on most days and nights throughout the country and capital Kyiv, one can see that nowhere in the world are athletes training in such conditions.
The attacks on Kyiv’s infrastructure and its power grids means electric supply is affected and primitive heating systems that put wood into chimneys are set up for heating.
Such heating systems went obsolete several decades ago.
Water supply faces disruptions often. To cope with it the centre has set up a couple of giant containers to keep water running in its premises.
The main training hall plays a video showing the war and the resistance of Ukrainian forces, which acts as a reminder of the ongoing war but that is not just the sole reminder. Lupu says many athletes from the centre have volunteered to fight for the Ukrainian resistance.
“We have lost athletes from here in the war,” says Lupu. “Many have gone to join the armed forces, some have died. Others come back for short spells to train here and then return to the battle.”
Training in itself has become a battle.
For some athletes, the training continues at the underground shelter where some basic training equipment is kept so that athletes can keep training while they are sheltering.
War brings its tragedies, but it also brings some wonders.
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