Ukraine’s Olga Kharlan celebrates after winning against South Korea’s Choi Se-bin in the women’s sabre individual bronze medal bout at the Grand Palais in Paris on Monday. — AFP
OLHA Kharlan went to her knees, as if in disbelief, after a stirring comeback in the women’s saber fencing competition. She kissed the metallic duelling surface.
Finally, she jumped into her coach’s arms and then bowed theatrically to the crowd.
She had just won a bronze medal by the thinnest margin, 15-14, beneath the vaulted glass dome of the Grand Palais.
It was her fifth career Olympic medal and the first of any colour for Ukraine at the Paris Games, an emotional moment of celebration and defiance for a nation at war.
“It’s really special, incredible, like infinity special,” Kharlan told reporters, speaking in English, saying her medal was won for her country and its defenders and for the Ukrainian athletes “who couldn’t come here because they were killed by Russia.”
Given the circumstances, it might have been the most meaningful medal of her career. Kharlan’s mere presence confirmed that this niche sport, perhaps more than any other, illustrates the acrimony and caustic feuding that have resulted from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Kharlan, 33, was disqualified from the World Fencing Championships last summer for refusing to shake hands with her Russian opponent.
But Thomas Bach, president of the International Olympic Committee and himself a 1976 Olympic fencing champion, gave Kharlan an exemption to participate in the Paris Games, citing her “unique situation.”
There she was on Monday, competing in the Olympics, while Russia was absent from the biggest international event in fencing, a sport in which it has long been a power athletically and administratively.
With Russia banned from these Games because of its invasion, only 15 of its athletes are competing in Paris, all designated as neutral, without the accompaniment of the country’s flag or national anthem. There are none in fencing, a huge blow to the country’s Olympic prestige given that Russia and the former Soviet Union rank behind only Italy, France and Hungary in fencing’s overall medal count.
Alisher Usmanov, an Uzbek-born Russian magnate, stepped aside days after the war began in February 2022 as president of the International Fencing Federation.
This followed economic sanctions levied against him by the European Union, which described Usmanov as having “particularly close ties” to President Vladimir Putin of Russia, and said he “actively supported” Russia’s policies regarding the “destabilisation of Ukraine.”
In a statement on Monday, Usmanov said he had only suspended his fencing duties and that he was seeking to lift the EU sanctions, which he called “unfair and illegal.”
Stanislav Pozdnyakov, president of the Russian Olympic Committee and himself a four-time Olympic fencing champion, is banned from the Paris Games, as are other Russian sports officials.
Missing, too, from these Games is his daughter, Sofia Pozdnyakova, a two-time Olympic fencing champion who was unable to qualify as a neutral athlete because she represents the Russian armed forces.
“They have to know the consequences” of the invasion, Kharlan said in an interview.
There was a brief, convivial thaw on Monday. Apparently not wanting to risk another disqualification, or perhaps just greeting a friend in an act of sportsmanship after her decisive victory in the last 16, Kharlan hugged her vanquished opponent, Anna Bashta, a Russian-born fencer now representing Azerbaijan.
Bashta said she and Kharlan had known each other for years and that she hoped the Ukrainian would win a gold medal later in the day.
But such Ukrainian-Russian relationships are mostly fractured now. At the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, Pozdnyakov and Vadym Gutzeit, now president of the Ukraine Olympic Committee, won a team gold medal in fencing as part of a collection of former Soviet republics called the Unified Team.
But Gutzeit now refers to Pozdnyakov, his one-time friend and teammate, as “my enemy.” Last year, Gutzeit told The Associated Press that, now and forever, “this person does not exist for me.”
The invasion has severed more than friendships. What amounted to a royal fencing marriage also collapsed after only two years, mostly because of the war.
Pozdnyakova’s former husband, Konstantin Lokhanov, also a Russian Olympic fencer, moved to the United States in 2022 and denounced the invasion.
“I decided I could no longer live in a country that kills innocent Ukrainians,” Lokhanov said in an interview last summer.
Two other prominent Russian fencers also moved to the United States and criticised the war, which resulted in the firing of a top Russian coach and an apparent swipe by Pozdnyakov at what he considered Western frivolousness.
His own daughter’s patriotic upbringing, he said in a Russian sports television interview, spared her “the sad fate of frightened lovers of raspberry frappe and yellow scooters.”
Kharlan, the Ukrainian star, said she had no regrets about refusing to shake hands at the world championships last summer in Milan after defeating her Russian opponent, Anna Smirnova, who protested by sitting in a chair for about 45 minutes in the competition area, known as a strip.
Her refusal to shake hands, Kharlan said, was a message to the world that, given what has happened in Ukraine, “nobody can just close their eyes to that.”
Along with tens of thousands of civilian deaths in the war, roughly 500 top-level Ukrainian athletes and coaches have died in the fighting.
At last count, 518 stadiums and sports training facilities have been damaged or destroyed. Hundreds of Ukrainian Olympic hopefuls trained outside the country, as did Kharlan, who lives in Italy.
These are Kharlan’s fifth Olympics and, in her words, “the hardest.”
She said that she had seen her parents only three times since the war began in February 2022. Her mother and sister have come to Paris to support her, but her father cannot because of a law that prevents most Ukrainian men younger than 60 from leaving the country.
Her hometown, Mykolaiv, in southern Ukraine, has been besieged by Russian strikes, a water crisis and power shortages.
Sometimes, she said, she is afraid to look at her phone because there is a “high chance” it will contain bad news.
“Each of us has been damaged by the war,” she said.
Bach, the IOC president, congratulated Kharlan on Monday night. Another chance to win a medal will come on Saturday in the women’s team saber competition.
Monday’s bronze, Kharlan said, was a “message to all Ukrainians, to all the world, that Ukraine never gives up.” — NYT
