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TOKYO – In American sporting terms, the Paralympians of Ukraine are a small market wonder, the Slavic equivalent of Oakland Athletics.
At the Tokyo Paralympic Games, which ended Sunday, the Ukrainians finished fifth in the overall medal standings with 98, just six behind the United States. Each of the top four countries – China, Britain, Russia and the United States – had more than 220 athletes in Tokyo, while Ukraine hosted 139.
“It is a small country that clearly exceeds its weight,” said Craig Spence, senior spokesperson for the International Paralympic Committee.
The success was not matched by the Ukrainian Olympians, who finished 16th in Tokyo’s overall medal standings last month. They won a gold medal, four behind Maksym Krypak, whose seven swimming medals – five gold, plus one silver and one bronze – made him the most decorated athlete of the Games. Tokyo Paralympics.
Ukraine has been one of the top six countries for medals at nine consecutive Paralympic Games, both summer and winter, although it is consistently ranked among the poorest countries in Europe and cited by the United Nations as a difficult home for people with disabilities.
This sporting success has been virtually uninterrupted in recent years, despite Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, which effectively cut off Ukrainian Paralympic contenders from their high-performance training center on the Black Sea. Technically, Ukraine retained ownership of the center, but Valerii Sushkevich, a longtime member of parliament and chairman of the country’s Paralympic committee, said its use was too complicated.
A new center with the necessary adapted equipment remains unfinished in Dnipro, a town in a government-controlled part of eastern Ukraine.
Sushkevich, 67, grew up under Soviet rule, using a wheelchair and becoming a competitive swimmer despite strong prejudices against public displays by people with disabilities.
“It wasn’t so good for the image of the Soviet Union, “Sushkevich said through an interpreter, recalling that he had indeed been told:” You must be outside of this society. “
The Soviets pledged to excel at the Olympics but did not send athletes to the Paralympics until 1988, the last cycle before the country completely disbanded in 1991.
Ukraine made its first Paralympic appearance as an independent country at the Atlanta Games in 1996, winning just seven medals, the equivalent of Krypak’s total in Tokyo.
But Sushkevich was developing a program, Invasport, that would place sports centers for people with disabilities in each of Ukraine’s two dozen oblasts or administrative divisions, and also create sports schools for children.
“Invasport was a combination of a state system and a non-government system,” he said, and its goal was to empower people to become active as much as to support Paralympians.
But there was a substantial incentive to build a sports career. Without it, people with disabilities had few options for earning a living.
“Before sport, I had practically nothing. In fact, not practically; literally I had nothing, ”two-time Paralympic weightlifting champion Lidiia Solovyova told the BBC in 2012. “I didn’t have a flat tire. I didn’t have a salary. I didn’t have a good retirement. But now, thanks to sport, I have all of these things.
Marta Hurtado, spokesperson for the United Nations Human Rights Office, confirmed that people with disabilities in Ukraine generally have very limited prospects.
“There is a worryingly high degree of institutionalization of people with disabilities in Ukraine, rather than providing family and community services,” she wrote in an email, adding: “Inclusive education for children disabled people remain a rarity rather than the norm. It is the result of limited infrastructure and strong negative attitudes in society.
Oksana Boturchuk, a four-time Paralympic runner who won three silver medals in Tokyo, said she had become a little more recognizable in Ukraine after the release this year of “Pulse”, a film about her life.
“But in my country Paralympic athletes are not very popular,” she said. “And everyone is surprised to know who I am. They say, “Oh, are you a Paralympic silver medalist? “
This summer, Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, visited the country’s Paralympic team ahead of his trip to Tokyo and apologized “for the fact that no president was personally present to send our Paralympians. at the Summer and Winter Games for all these years. “
Two substantial changes came ahead of the 2018 Paralympic Winter Games: live broadcasts of events and an increase in bonuses to match what Olympians received.
Sushkevich said the prize is around $ 125,000 for a gold medal, $ 80,000 for silver and $ 55,000 for bronze. Previously, he said, prices were around $ 40,000 for gold, $ 26,000 for silver and $ 8,000 for bronze, roughly what the US Olympians and Paralympians get. currently.
This summer’s results, Sushkevich conceded, were disappointing compared to the country’s third place (behind China and Britain) in the 2016 medal tally, which included 41 gold medals compared to 24 this year. (The International Paralympic Committee officially ranks teams based on gold medals, not the overall total.)
The return of competitors from Russia, who were excluded in 2016 due to revelations about a state-sponsored doping program, has virtually guaranteed a lower ranking than Ukraine this summer. And Ukraine’s smallest delegation rarely includes competitive entries in sports like wheelchair basketball and rugby or goalball, sports in which the United States accumulates a lot of equipment.
“A lot of people around me told us we had a really good result in 2016 because we were higher than the United States,” said Maxym Nikolenko, three-time Paralympian who won a gold medal this year. there and a silver and bronze medal in Tokyo. “I’m sorry,” he added sheepishly, “but they were really proud of it.”
Maria Varenikova contributed reporting from Kiev, Ukraine.
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