Climber Jenya Kazbekova will represent Ukraine at the Paris Olympics in the combined climbing event, two and a half years after fleeing the war in her country. Kazbekova, who learned to climb on the cliffs of Crimea, hopes her presence will serve as a reminder that Ukraine still needs help from the international community.
Jenya Kazbekova, 27, officially qualified to compete in the Paris Olympics on June 22 following a final qualifying competition held in Budapest.
Sharing the good news on Instagram, she posted a lighthearted photo of herself wearing a big smile and Olympics-themed glasses but included a serious message: “It’s for Ukraine!” she handwrote on the supersized “boarding pass” she carried.
“It means everything to do this with Ukraine in my heart,” she wrote.
In less than a month, Kazbekova will be competing at Le Bourget Sport Climbing venue in the combined boulder and lead climbing event. “I want to remind people that Ukraine exists, that it is at war and that we need help,” she says, two and a half years after the full-scale Russian invasion forced her to leave her country.
Kazbekova, from Dnipro in eastern Ukraine, didn’t grow up with a strong sense of patriotism, saying that “borders tend to separate people”.
She was accustomed to travelling the world from an early age. Born into a sport-climbing dynasty, she spent her childhood accompanying her parents – world champions in the discipline – as they travelled the globe to various climbing competitions.
“My parents were quite progressive when it came to education. They took me everywhere with them. I went to school remotely, and I was always there to encourage them,” she says. “This gave me my two passions. I was 8 when I told them, ‘I want to do what you do, climb and travel!’”
Kazbekova has fond memories of her many family vacations in Crimea, spent either swimming in the Black Sea or climbing the peninsula’s limestone cliffs. Kazbekova’s grandmother won the Soviet Union’s speed-climbing championship scaling the same cliffs in the 1960s.
“Climbing has always been part of my life. I can’t remember not climbing,” she says. “I have lots of memories of it in Crimea. It’s where my father taught me to deal with fear and where I climbed my first big cliffs. It’s a beautiful region and certainly my favourite place in the world.”
Tokyo’s shattered dream
Kazbekova was quick to make her mark in competitive climbing, winning the World Youth Championship at age 13 and landing her first contracts with sponsors a year later. She became senior national champion of Ukraine at the age of just 16 – a title she hasn’t lost since – and entered the international professional circuit.
“Obviously, there were periods in my life when I questioned myself a lot, when I wondered if it was all my dream or my parents’ dream,” she says. “But in the end, I always came to the same conclusion: I love competition and it’s really what I want.”
Kazbekova has excelled in two climbing disciplines involved in this year’s Olympic competition: lead climbing – in which athletes climb as high as they can on a wall 15m high without having seen the route ahead of time – and bouldering, where the climbers scale 4.5-metre-high walls without ropes, in a limited period of time and in the fewest attempts possible.
She took eighth place in a Climbing World Cup lead event in Chamonix in 2017, and seventh place the following year in Italy.
But she suffered a setback in 2019, injuring her knee during a qualifying competition for the Tokyo Olympics. “It was the first round of the qualifying tournament in Toulouse. I kept going as best I could, but I didn’t manage to qualify,” she says. In 2020 she missed her last chance to qualify for the Tokyo Games after testing positive for Covid-19.
“And just like that, my dream of going to the Tokyo Olympics was gone,” she says.
“In reality, I was coming out of a very intense period, I was close to burn-out,” she says. “The whole Covid-19 period allowed me to recharge my physical and mental batteries. I started working with a psychologist and a mental coach. It did me a lot of good.”
‘We were woken up by explosions’
“It was on February 24, 2022, that everything really turned upside down and my life totally changed,” Kazbekova says, her voice beginning to choke with emotion and tears welling up in her eyes.
At the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, she was with her mother and younger sister in Kyiv for training. “Very early in the morning, we were woken up by the sound of explosions. I was so scared. We took all our belongings and fled.”
Her family was one of many to leave Ukraine in the days following the outbreak of war. After four days of driving they finally arrived in Germany, waiting in a miles-long traffic jam to cross the border.
“Leaving like this is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my life,” says Kazbekova. “We left everything behind. My grandparents are still there, along with other members of my family, my friends ...”
Initially, Kazbekova could not think about climbing competitions. “I wanted to put everything on hold. It seemed totally absurd to go and fight for medals while others were fighting for real and risking their lives in my country,” she says.
Then she made the acquaintance of a Lebanese climbing coach, Malek: “He knows what war is like. He understood the situation I was in. He managed to change my state of mind, to make me understand why what I was doing was important for Ukraine and why I had to carry on.”
So Kazbekova returned to training, more determined than ever. She now climbs full time under Malek’s guidance in Salt Lake City, Utah, while her parents and younger sister Rafael – who is herself a competition climber – have settled in Manchester, England.
Qualifying for the Paris Olympics has been Kazbekova’s overriding ambition over the past two and a half years. “It was a long process and I knew I had to give it my all if I wanted to make it,” she says.
She broke her training schedule only to defend her Ukrainian championship title in Kyiv, which she says was “an important moment”.
“I know that a lot of people are following me in Ukraine. Continuing to take part in local competitions is a way of showing that I’m still here.”
Her efforts have paid off. At the European qualifying tournament in Laval, France, in October, Kazbekova placed fourth – sporting an outfit in the colours of the Ukrainian flag. Despite not making it to the podium, she was reassured by her performance. “It showed me that I was at a good level and that I was ready,” she says.
Then, in this year’s round of international qualifying in Shanghai in May, “everything fell into place, I felt at my best and I enjoyed myself enormously”. In Budapest, a month later, she again performed well and earned her qualification for the Olympics.
In all, 10 places for the 2024 Games were awarded to the top finishers in these two qualifying events. “It was my boyfriend who told me I’d qualified. I was doing a doping test – I couldn’t believe it. Even now, it’s hard to believe.”
‘A huge responsibility’
“For Tokyo, when I was young, I didn’t realise what a huge responsibility it was to represent your country in an event like the Olympics,” she says. “Today, with the war, it has taken on a different dimension. I know what message I want to convey and I’m proud to wear the colours of Ukraine.”
“For two and a half years, the reality of war hasn’t left me,” she says. A few hours after the joy of her qualification for the Olympics, she learned that her home town, Dnipro, was being bombed again.
“I live in a constant state of ambivalence where every happiness has a backdrop of horror.”
“In Paris, I want to show that Ukrainians are still here, strong and resilient, but also remind people that we exist and that we need help to put an end to this war,” she says.
After the Olympics, Kazbekova hopes to return to Ukraine to see her grandparents and friends who stayed behind. She also hopes to tell young Ukrainian climbers about her adventure in Paris in the hope that her story will inspire them.
This article has been adapted from the original in French.
