BRNO, Czech Republic — It was an unusual place to hold a high jump at the end of June: a parking lot outside a shopping center. Customers briefly stopped with their bags. A group of spectators, including Ukrainian war refugees, stood along a railing for a moment of cheer. Human statues, painted gold, froze in poses like ancient Olympians. Cars and trucks drove south on the highway towards Slovakia.
If it wasn’t a traditional encounter, there has been nothing conventional lately for Yaroslava Mahuchikh, 20, of Ukraine, the displaced Olympic bronze medalist who is the gold medal favorite at the World Outdoor Athletics Championships that kicked off Friday in Eugene, Ore. .
On February 24, Mahuchikh (pronounced ma-GU-chi-huh or ma-HU-chick) was awakened by horrifying explosions in Dnipro, her hometown, in eastern central Ukraine. Russia had begun its invasion. An explosion, captured on video, fireball in the dark sky. Dnipro’s airport and military facilities in the area had been attacked.
Mahuchikh called her parents and her coach, then traveled to her coach’s home in the nearby village of Sukhachivka, figuring it would be safer there. They developed a routine, rushing to the basement when warning sirens sounded and training in an indoor jumping facility whenever possible. They soon left the country. For how long no one knew.
On March 6, Mahuchikh, her coach, her coach’s husband and her coach’s son, who is also Mahuchikh’s boyfriend, embarked on a three-day odyssey by car to Belgrade, Serbia, to participate in the World Indoor Athletics Championships .
Defiance and compliance at the world meeting, Mahuchikh wore yellow eyeliner and painted her fingernails yellow and blue, the national colors of Ukraine. And despite the tragic disruption of the war and the emotional distress of leaving her family behind, she won first place and received loud applause.
“The result showed that Ukraine is a powerful, independent country that Russia does not need,” Mahuchikh’s 56-year-old coach Tetiana Stepanova said through an interpreter during the high jump competition in Brno, the Czech Republic’s second largest city. Brno is about two hours southeast of Prague, the capital.
Sport has become a sign of unity, triumph, resilience and perseverance for Ukraine. To be men’s national football team was embraced internationally this spring when it bravely tried, and narrowly failed, to qualify for the World Cup to be held in Qatar in November and December.
“I protect Ukraine on the track,” said Mahuchikh. “Some protect Ukraine in the arts. We all hang out together.”
But the lavish statistics of sports offer only a slight distraction from the grim statistics of war. Even by conservative estimates, tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians have died in Ukraine. People hide in basements and children’s toys now contain parts of rockets, Stepanova said with sad eloquence.
At least for now, Mahuchikh thinks it is too risky to return to Ukraine and even if she did, it would be too difficult to repeatedly leave for the international circuit. She lived in Germany and Turkey for months before moving to California in early July to prepare for the outdoor world championships.
Her mother, sister and niece left Ukraine and joined her in Germany. But her father and grandmother remain in Dnipro. It is a center of humanitarian aid, military resistance and freshly dug graves in rows like abandoned crops. It has not been shattered to rubble like Mariupol and other cities in the east, but civilian targets there have been shelled with missiles and the airport is destroyed.
When a recent storm brought severe thunderstorms, Mahuchikh said, her frightened grandmother thought it was the rumble of a bombing. Other Ukrainian high jumpers who joined her in the Czech Republic in June brought their own heartbreaking stories.
Maryna Kovtunova, 15, is the Ukrainian youth champion who has become Mahuchikh’s protégé. When Kovtunova fled Mariupol with her mother and father in March and their apartment was destroyed, she said a bullet had been shot into the family car, apparently by a sniper. It slammed into the rear window, bounced off, and got stuck in the windshield. Kovtunova has a photo on her phone of her holding the bullet, the tip curved vaguely like a rhinoceros horn.
The caption of the photo, translated, says: “I’m alive, but this bullet almost hit me. I bent down in time.”
Kateryna Tabashnyk, 28, said her family’s apartment in the eastern city of Kharkov was hit by a rocket that injured her 8-year-old nephew. He was hospitalized, she said, and one of his kidneys was removed. She has lived in Spain, which, like other European countries, has offered apartments and training facilities to the exiled Ukrainians.
“The hardest thing is that I had to leave for a long time without the possibility to take them,” Tabashnyk said through an interpreter.
When Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, was attacked, Iryna Gerashchenko, 27, who finished fourth in the high jump at the Tokyo Olympics, hid for a week in her parents’ cold basement with her husband and their dog. She then left for Western Ukraine without even a track uniform or spikes. For several days she trained in the sneakers of a teammate’s mother. Finally, a friend delivered track clothes and shoes in a care package sent by her parents. Gerashchenko and three teammates then drove on to Belgrade, where she finished fifth at the World Indoor Championships.
She later moved to training camps in Portugal and Poland, but as the outdoor world championships approached, Gerashchenko jumped from one competition to another across Europe, her belongings crammed into two suitcases. She hasn’t seen her parents in over four months.
“I want to hug them,” she said.
Mahuchikh and Stepanova, her coach, set out on their odyssey to Belgrade in March with a digital letter from the Ukrainian Athletics Federation, explaining why they were leaving the country. But there was a five-hour wait at the western border with Moldova due to traffic and confirmation of their travel documents. As the 72-hour journey continued through Moldova, Romania and Serbia, Mahuchikh slept in the car. Apart from stops for food and refueling, her driver, Stepanova’s husband, Serhii Stepanov, took a nap of only three hours.
How did he stay awake for so long? He shrugged, smiled and said, “Five Red Bulls.”
On June 22, Mahuchikh took part in one of Europe’s quirkiest encounters in the Czech Republic, the Brnenska Latka, loosely translated as Brno’s (High Jump) Bar. It has been held for 25 years, often in the Olympia shopping center (hence the living statues with a spear and discus). This year it took place for the first time in the parking lot of the shopping center.
One of the organizers of the meet, Simon Zdenek, was a boy in 1968, the communist era, when he held his father’s hand and watched Soviet tanks come in to mark a period of reform in Czechoslovakia known as Prague Spring. “Never forget this,” his father told him. He hadn’t, Zdenek said. The day before the race, he drove an hour and a half to pick up Gerashchenko, the itinerant Ukrainian star, at the airport in Vienna.
“We understand what they’re going through,” Zdenek said. “We want to help them.”
Two brothers from Dnipro, Yegor and Nikita Chesak, elite hurdlers and quarter-miles now temporarily living near Brno, raised a blue-and-yellow national flag to encourage Mahuchikh and other Ukrainian jumpers. Serhiy Slisenko, 25, traveled 13 or 14 hours by bus from Lviv in western Ukraine to compete in the men’s high jump competition and jumped at his best height outdoors.
“It is really important to do what you can to show that you are Ukrainian and that you can do your best even in these difficult circumstances,” said Slisenko.
Mahuchikh wore blue and yellow eyeliner and a pendant in the shape of Ukraine. Gerashchenko wore a blue-yellow ribbon in her hair and a blue-yellow ring on her hand. A small group of Ukrainian spectators, displaced and living in Brno, cheered them on, saying: “Jump, jump, jump, let’s go, you can do it!”
The excitement and closeness of the small crowd, in the midst of a war in the background, gave the competition urgent energy. Mahuchikh triumphed with a 2.03 meter jump, the best in the world this year, her back and legs seemingly as pointed as the roof of a house when she knew the winning height.
Russians, including the reigning Olympic women’s high jump champion, Maria Lasitskene, have been banned from the Oregon World Championships because of the invasion. It is good to exclude the Russians, Mahuchikh said, adding: “Human life is more important than any competition.”
This fall, she hopes it will be safe to return to Dnipro to see her father and grandmother. She feels it is her duty to tell her story and the story of her country, but Mahuchikh is only 20 and it has not always been easy being a high jumper and a war ambassador.
“Mentally it’s so hard,” she said. “I have to focus on competition and training, but sometimes I’m crying in the room. Now I think all Ukrainians live the same way. They want to go home. They want to see their husbands and their fathers.”