Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - July 15, 2024, Winnipeg, Manitoba WINNIPEGFREEPRESS.COM ● C5 SPORTS MONDAY, JULY 15, 2024 Family-friendly measures an Olympic win for athlete-moms PARIS could be the site of many Olym- pic Games firsts: It aims to be the first fully gender-equal Games, the first to drastically reduce carbon emissions, and will feature the first opening cere- mony not held in a stadium. It may also be the most accessi- ble to athletes with young children, and particularly athlete-moms — as more choose to compete after having children and become more vocal about the struggles of balancing motherhood with competitive sports. For the first time, the Olympic Vil- lage will feature a nursery — to help athletes more easily spend time with their babies or infants amid grueling competition and training schedules. The French National Olympic and Sports Committee has also pledged to make hotel rooms available for French athletes who are breastfeeding, as part of a set of measures to create more space for “parenthood” within the Games. Olympic organizers say these mea- sures are needed to promote women’s participation in sports — and to keep up with the times. “Society is changing and this meets our athletes’ needs,” said Astrid Guy- art, general secretary of the French National Olympic and Sports Commit- tee, told French newspaper Le Monde. American track and field athlete Allyson Felix, who won 11 Olympic medals before retiring from the sport in 2022, told CBS the launch of the nursery, in the nonresidential area of the Olympic Village, represents “a shift in the culture” around female athletes. “I think it really tells women that you can choose motherhood and also be at the top of your game and not have to miss a beat,” said Felix, who is on the International Olympic Committee’s Athletes’ Commission. To be sure, athlete-moms — and female athletes more broadly— can still face obstacles at the highest levels of sports, including unequal pay and lower public visibility. And change is slow: Ahead of the last Summer Olym- pics in Tokyo in 2021, the International Olympic Committee barred family from accompanying athletes, includ- ing children who were still nursing, because of pandemic restrictions, before reversing and acknowledging the “unique situation facing athletes with nursing children,” after an outcry led by female athletes. Individual athletes have led the charge to secure arrangements for themselves and their families at the 2024 Games — by advocating in the media and even appealing directly to political leaders. In January, Olympic medalist and judoka Clarisse Agbegne- nou, 31, said she took French President Emmanuel Macron aside during his visit with the French national judo team and told him, “I would like to have my daughter with me in the Olympic Village to feel good and be fully committed in my final stretch of these Olympic Games.” “I tried to give some advice to help us be even better … I think it was heard, I hope so anyway,” Agbegnenou told RMC Sport. She added that more changes were needed “on the issue of health, family.” In recent years, famous athletes such as Felix, soccer player Alex Mor- gan and retired American tennis play- er Serena Williams have voiced their frustration with the fact that women’s sports are not always equally valued, compensated or promoted in media and during major sporting events. Children and families are generally not allowed inside the Olympic Village. French Olympic organizers said, “the village must remain a preserved place, where only athletes and staff coexist in a performance dynamic.” This year, under new policies for the Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games, a nursery will be set up in the nonres- idential area in the Olympic Village Plaza, and will be open every day from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. to parents of babies and infants “and their dedicated caregiv- ers,” Paris 2024 organizers said. France is going even further — mak- ing special accommodations for the first time this year to allow its athletes access to a dedicated breastfeeding space at a hotel near the Olympic Village, and to stay there if they want to remain with their child, the French National Olympic and Sports Commit- tee said. French athletes with children of any age will also have access to a shared space to spend time together during the day. And during the Paralympic Games, athletes with babies under the age of one will receive “guest passes” to allow their babies into the Olympic Village twice a day so they can be breastfed. The same rule will apply for athletes with children up to three years old when the child has special needs or disabilities. “It’s really cool what the French Olympic Committee is doing for their breastfeeding and parent athletes,” Ca- nadian basketball player Kim Gaucher, who helped push for the IOC to reverse its policy on nursing children at the To- kyo Olympics, said in an article shared by the Canadian Olympic Committee. “This is what we want to be the norm.” — The Washington Post ANNABELLE TIMSIT MARTIN MEISSNER / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS FILES American athlete Allyson Felix says the launch of the nursery in the nonresidential area of the Olympic Village represents ‘a shift in the culture’ around female athletes. Russia’s war threatens Ukraine’s Olympic future, not just the present A LOST GENERATION OF ATHLETES C HORNOMORSK, Ukraine — When Oleksandra Paskal first took to the mat as a 4-year-old, her rhyth- mic gymnastics coach saw nothing but potential in a sport where the Olympics is the ultimate goal. Then a Russian missile crushed her summer house in the southern Odesa region, burying her beneath the debris and severing her left leg. Oleksandra’s coach, Inga Kovalchuk, prides herself on her ability to spot the future. But it’s increasingly clear that Russia’s war on Ukraine is demolish- ing the seeds of a sports culture that was a European powerhouse. Two years after she was injured in May 2022, Oleksandra was among 12 girls diligently following the instruc- tions of their demanding coach in the sunlit room. No one paid attention to her prosthetic leg, but although she has even more of the grit and dedication that first caught Kovalchuk’s eye, she will never be quite the same. “Oleksandra, you do the exercise on full foot, the others — on half toes,” Kovalchuk told the group. Now 8, the girl who once aimed to compete at the Olympics now dreams of the Paralympics. She was back training after just six months of rehab. Radiating confidence, she won her first competition a year after the attack with unflappable grace and fluidity and is inspiring a following well beyond the rhythmic gymnastics community. “Sometimes I am even fearful: Will I manage? Not her, but me?” Kovalchuk confessed. “And in general, it’s incredi- bly hard for all of them right now.” It takes a decade and a national infrastructure of training facilities, feeder schools, equipment and coaches to nurture an Olympic champion, and a process that begins in early childhood ends up winnowing out most contend- ers long before they reach the Games. More than 500 sports facilities were damaged or occupied by Moscow’s troops, depriving young athletes of a place to train, according to the Sports Ministry. Coaches joined the army or fled abroad, and some children who left early in the war haven’t returned. Those who remain find their practices are frequently interrupted by air raid alarms that can last for hours. The destruction of sports schools means some children may never even begin to discover their potential. Even if the war stopped tomorrow, it could take Ukrainian athletics a decade to recoup the losses, Veerle De Bosscher, a sports policy professor at Vrije University in Brussels, Belgium, who researches how countries produce champions, wrote in an email to The Associated Press. Seventy of Kovalchuk’s 110 gym- nasts from before the war, including some of her best prospects, fled the country and haven’t returned. She has some new students, including inter- nally displaced children, but her class now totals only 60. “My primary task today is not to achieve high results in sports but to preserve the mental and physical health of our children,” Kovalchuk said. “Judges don’t care where you’re from” According to Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenska, more than two million children have fled the country. The departures have already impacted var- ious sports, as coaches lost trainees in whom they had invested years of work. At Kyiv’s Liko Diving School, Ukraine’s largest, 50 per cent of the most promising children are gone, said Illia Tseliutin, head coach of Ukraine’s national diving team. Two of the 20 coaches joined the army and three fled the country. Those numbers are almost certainly higher for schools in the frontline east and south, he said. Tseliutin understands on a personal level. He fled the Luhansk region in 2014 soon after Russian forces first at- tacked there, and his hometown of Ru- bizhne has been occupied since 2022. Many Ukrainian divers and swimmers are originally from the occupied east and south and have no home to return to, much less a functioning pool, and so they remain abroad. “We are at war, children are leaving, and they might compete for other countries,” Tseliutin said. That creates a vicious cycle even for those who remain in Ukraine, who have fewer high-level athletes to measure them- selves against and who find their own time in the pool interrupted by air raid alarms that go on for hours, he said. Before, coaches planned the training schedule four years in advance. Now they are simply trying to ensure their sport survives the war. “Our task is to prepare for compe- titions,” Tseliutin said. “Judges don’t care where you’re from, they only score your jumps.” ● ● ● The southern city of Kherson, located on the shores of Dnipro River, was once fertile ground for Ukrainian rowing. The Ukrainian rowing team heading to Paris this year counts sev- eral crews from the region, which also boasts past Olympians as well. But that section of the Dnipro is now the only natural barrier between Ukrainian and Russian troops in the region, with drones, artillery and mis- siles flying overhead daily and mines in the water. All 200 children and 15 coaches involved in rowing in Kherson fled the city, which is under near-constant attack, and only about 20 per cent of the children are still rowing at all, whether in Ukraine or abroad, Ihor Harahulia, president of the non-prof- it Kherson Rowing Federation. The Kherson School of Higher Sportsman- ship, where rowers and other competi- tive athletes trained, is a pile of rubble after numerous Russian attacks and flooding from the explosion of the Kakhovka dam last June. Any child in Kherson today is unlike- ly to discover an untapped talent for rowing, given the danger on the water, and the lack of coaches and facilities. Harahulia is still there, but even he has abandoned the waters. He delivers humanitarian aid by car. “There’s no way for someone to row right now, because it’s almost certainly fatal,” he said. But there’s no point rebuilding sports infrastructure now, Acting Sports Minister Matvii Bidnyi said, “because there will be another strike and we will (lose) the invested money.” This is why people like Hennadii Zuiev, who is among the coaches who fled Ukraine, struggle to imagine a return. The 48-year-old high jump trainer left Kherson in the early days of Russia’s full-scale invasion and moved from country to country across Europe with his family. Before the war he had several young athletes. Now he’s in the Portuguese city of Monte Gordo and focused only on adults. Among those he trained are Ukrainian high jumpers Kateryna Ta- bashnyk and Andriy Protsensko. The latter qualified for the Paris Olympics. Zuiev would like to return to Ukraine, but his city is under constant fire and the school where he once trained is in ruins. “I just can’t imagine yet how, where, and what I will do,” he says. “Every day I think about it, and every day I can’t find an answer for myself.” — The Associated Press HANNA ARHIROVA EFREM LUKATSKY / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Oleksandra Paskal, an 8-year-old girl with a prosthetic leg, practises rhythmic gymnastics with other girls under the direction of coach Inga Kovalchuk in Chornomorsk, Odesa region, Ukraine, earlier this year. ‘My primary task today is not to achieve high results in sports but to preserve the mental and physical health of our children,’ the coach says. ;