Yaroslava Mahuchikh drove 2000 kilometers, the Ukrainian high jump star sat in the car for three days – to start at the World Indoor Championships in Belgrade this weekend.
“Explosions, fires and air raid sirens” accompanied her on her trip out of Ukraine, the 20-year-old said: “I would like to believe that it was just a nightmare. But that’s the reality. That’s the reality of war .”
Despite the Russian attack on their country, Mahuchikh and five other Ukrainian women are in Belgrade. There are no men – they are not allowed to leave the country because of the war. Mahuchikh had won bronze in Tokyo – and then celebrated with Olympic champion Marija Lasizkene from Russia. Lasizkene will not be at the start, the world association World Athletics (WA) has excluded all athletes, coaches and officials from Russia and Belarus from all international events “with immediate effect for the foreseeable future” because of the Russian invasion.
Mahuchikh remembers the beginning of the war only too well. “It was February 24, 4:30 a.m. when I woke up in my apartment in the city of Dnipropetrovsk to the terrible sounds of explosions, artillery fire and gunfire,” she said: “Even before I called my parents, I knew it was it was war.”
After hours of “total panic,” she left Dnipropetrovsk and found some kind of safety in a small village. “Nobody thought about training at the time, because we were forced to sit in the basement for days and follow the news from Kyiv, Sumy and Kharkov every minute,” she said: “A few days later I started training, but I was able to in a stadium we don’t do anything.” And yet somehow she made it to Belgrade.