During the night missiles and drones hit Kiev, also damaging the Valeriy Lobanovskyi stadium. The tennis player, after overwhelming Selekhmeteva: “A missile destroyed a building just 100 meters from my parents’ house”
For yet another night, Kiev woke up to the sound of alarms. And above all bombs. During the night between yesterday and today, a missile and drone attack hit the Ukrainian capital. Damaging, among other things, the Valeriy Lobanovskyi stadium, which hosts Dynamo Kiev’s home matches. Glass destroyed, but no damage to the pitch, effectively “only” forcing the start of the match between the home team and Kudrivka to be postponed. However, with a strengthening of security and specialists to ensure maximum safety for players, workers and spectators: the priority. The fate for city buildings, however, was very different. As world no. 15 Marta Kostyuk testified, in tears, after her debut victory at Roland Garros (6-2 6-3 over Spain’s Oksana Selekhmeteva): “This morning a missile destroyed a building just 100 meters from my parents’ house. A little further and I would no longer have my mother and sister.”
nightmare
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Kostyuk doesn’t always express himself so directly, but in this case his emotions prevailed. On the other hand, he saw a photo, sent by his mother from the window of his house, of a building razed to the ground, with fire and smoke enveloping everything. “Today was one of the most difficult matches of my career”, she says, “I spent part of the morning crying, and I didn’t know how I would have dealt with it. I’m happy to have played first, because if I had played later in the day I don’t know how I would have reacted. But I don’t want to talk about myself, today my thoughts are entirely towards the Ukrainian people, who continue to fight every day. Slava Ukrainians”. It is no coincidence that he closed with a national slogan, which stands for “glory to Ukraine”, a sign of struggle, used increasingly frequently since 2022, the year of the Russian invasion.
importance
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In fact, although there is less and less talk about it, even within the ATP and WTA circuits, the conflict is absolutely ongoing. And Kostyuk’s words are a clear example: “I think the circuit has forgotten the situation a bit, but I live it every day and I’ve also gotten used to this forgetfulness. And I use my relevance, my speeches to remember what happens”. All Ukrainian tennis players, on the other hand, in their own way make their support for their nation felt, taking advantage of their international echo. And Marta, born in 2002, among the top 15 in the world, knows it very well. Especially because he experienced firsthand, as a teenager, the beginnings of the war: “The beginning of the war on a large scale was the most difficult moment, because you don’t know what’s happening. My whole family was there, there were 17 of us in the house. Nothing had ever happened so close to my family’s home though, and this makes the episode emotionally more important for me. Even though no one I know was injured or killed.” He says it with a subdued relief, well aware of the pain that many of his fellow citizens have felt, and are feeling, in these very hours: “The Ukrainian people are my greatest example, I never thought of not playing today, I knew that many would come to support me. Slava Ukraini!”.
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