After the dramatic incident involving US synchronized swimmer Anita Alvarez, who fell unconscious to the bottom of the pool after the end of her solo performance on Wednesday and was rescued by her trainer at the last second, calm returned to Alfréd-Hajós on Saturday Stadium on Budapest’s Margaret Island. It’s the final day of the World Championship competitions – and it’s very emotional and upsetting again. Albeit in a completely different way than on Wednesday, when everyone was still in shock after Alvarez’s downfall.
After bronze in 2013 and 2019 and silver in 2017, the Ukrainian synchronized swimming team won the first gold ever at the World Championships in the afternoon, ahead of Japan and Italy, with an outstanding 95.0333 out of a maximum of one hundred possible points. With their choreography “A Magic Castle”, the ten swimmers, whose bathing suits depicted the Ukrainian flag, delighted the spectators in the well-attended grandstand. There were also some Ukrainian flags, waved by their mothers, who had come to Budapest from the war zone.
Of course, with this young team little revolves around the sport and almost everything revolves around the war. And so the gold medal winner Maryna Aleksiiva stands in the interview zone on Saturday and tells her story in detail about fear, flight – and an arrival 2580 kilometers further west. “We were sleeping when the war started, my sister said to me when she woke up: Oh, fireworks. We couldn’t believe that this was happening in the 21st century,” says Aleksiiva of the SZ. A training session that they actually wanted to go to every day was out of the question: “In the days and weeks that followed, many of our girls slept in the air raid shelter, in the subway stations.”
Gradually they fled their home country of Kharkiv, the heavily bombed city in eastern Ukraine, to Lviv in the west, where it was safer. And from there, together with their trainers, further abroad. The bus journey lasted three days and finally ended in Savona, the Italian town in Liguria that is best known for its ferry port.
Her training complex in Kharkiv was bombed on Friday, says a swimmer
Masses of vacationers travel from there to Corsica or Sardinia, but the Ukrainian synchronized swimmers really only wanted one thing: to go home. “But we can’t go back and we don’t know when we can,” says Aleksiiva. Since then they have lived in two apartments with their trainers in Savona. And they started training there, helped by friendly ties with their Italian competitors.
The Ukrainian dubbing team has little to do with sport and almost everything revolves around this war – but they still win gold at the World Cup.
(Photo: Maddie Meyer/Getty Images)
Their training complex in the middle of Kharkiv was only bombed on Friday, says Aleksiiva, but they don’t know what happened to their pool. Her teammate Valeriya Tyshchenko, who is standing next to her and also speaks excellent English, says that “a lot of athletes that we know are also defending our country, especially a lot of biathletes because they are good at shooting. A lot of athletes died too. More than the ten that are officially known”.
They now call themselves sisters, the time in Savona made them sisters. And it welded them together so much that they were able to win the gold medal in Budapest, which is actually hard to believe – after all the traumatic experiences, the lack of training, all the imponderables. Perhaps more importantly, some of them were allowed to spend a little time with their mothers before their bus headed back to Savona. One can only imagine how difficult the renewed separation must have been. Valeriya Tyshchenko concludes: “We just want to see our fathers again, we miss them so much. But we know that’s impossible now.”