It is a radiant spring afternoon at Koncha Zaspa. A friendly padel tournament is about to start outside and somebody has started up a barbecue for watching athletes and staff. In the canteen Iryna Koliadenko is shedding light on the pressure that mounts every morning when she rises, here at Ukraine’s Olympic training base a half-hour drive outside central Kyiv, and continues her quest for gold.
“It’s hard to prepare for competitions because I’m constantly under stress,” she says. “Psychologically it’s very difficult to withstand everything because there’s shelling, people are dying, sometimes there’s no light because the electricity goes off. There are air raid alarms all the time. It’s difficult to switch to the training mindset when you’re already psychologically exhausted and tired but you still need to go there, show some results and get better.”
Even so, this summer Koliadenko has a genuine hope of reaching the very top. In February she became European champion in the women’s freestyle 65kg wrestling event, building on two previous golds in the 62kg category. At Tokyo 2020 the 25-year-old won bronze in the latter and she feels ready to stand on the podium again to demonstrate Ukraine’s resilience amid the trauma of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
“I want to go to Paris, bring a medal back to Ukraine and show the world once again that we are not going to give up,” she says. “Despite all our difficult moments we will rise, move forwards and glorify our country.”
Koliadenko was staying at Koncha Zaspa, recovering from an injury, when life turned upside down on 24 February 2022. She recalls how it became “all about survival, just forgetting about sport” after explosions woke her and numerous teammates. “Those who were able to packed their things and went home, but some just stayed here,” she says. “There were girls who didn’t have their own car. Some of them lived here and were brought food by volunteers.”
The story Koliadenko tells of her own departure is long and harrowing. She returned to her native Irpin, a dormitory town to Kyiv’s north-west, and to her aunt’s home in the nearby village of Dmytrivka. In those early weeks that area was the scene of a bloody battle as Russian forces looked to encircle the capital. The fortnight until 8 March was a vision of hell. “There was no water, light, gas supply or food,” she says. “Nothing. Just shells exploding. For two weeks we were almost constantly in the basement, going into the street only from necessity.”
Food supplies came from the small store run by Koliadenko’s aunt. With the situation becoming increasingly parlous she escaped with several family members, despite running the risk that her yellow car would be spotted by the Russians who were shooting at anything that moved. After a harrowing 36-hour journey on barely-passable roads they were able to stay with distant relatives in the safer Vinnytsia region.
By the end of the month she was in Hungary, helping coach Ukraine at the European Championships while she continued her rehabilitation. “We performed poorly and it was understandable,” she says. “We got there and nobody had been able to train, the war had stopped everything.”
It makes Koliadenko’s subsequent achievements all the more remarkable. Many of Ukraine’s sportspeople left the country permanently; after the Russians were driven out she returned to Irpin and Dmytrivka where, terrifyingly, the family’s apartment had been gutted beyond recognition by tank fire. Repairs took time and patience. She wonders whether, at the time, her peers from abroad understood what Ukrainians were undergoing.
“Very few people asked me,” she says. “Two or three wrote and enquired how things were going. One girl invited me to Latvia and offered to organise everything if I had nowhere to live.
“Nowadays I sense people who aren’t in Ukraine are tired of this. I think they’re accustomed to news about the war and, because they’re not involved and it’s not happening to them, Ukraine seems uninteresting.”
She is desperate to change that and recalls a training camp in Japan where she met students who initially “just looked at each other like: ‘There’s a war?’” when shown a presentation about its horrors. “Of course they were shocked when they saw the footage. But this is our mission, the mission of Ukrainian athletes: not just to win but to tell people what is happening, to remind them we need help and support.”
Some Russian and Belarusian athletes will be allowed to compete in Paris under a neutral flag; at least 10 were to be wrestlers until, on 6 July, Russia’s wrestling federation announced they had rejected their invitation. “We have a war going on, relatives dying and infrastructure collapsing, and they’re able to sit there calmly and prepare for the Olympics,” she says. “They are completely different states of mind.”
Koliadenko, who also won a world championship bronze in Belgrade last year, is determined to adopt a winning mentality on multiple fronts when the Games begin. “We are a strong people who have gone through a lot since independence,” she says. “We are trying to do something better, for our country and for ourselves.”
