AS THE WAR in Ukraine rages on, the effects are omnipresent in the country. Even in the capital city of Kyiv, considered one of the “safe spots,” rockets zoom past buildings and drones are visible overhead. Yet Ukraine’s top athletes remain hell-bent on competing in this summer’s Olympic Games in Paris—the nation’s first Olympics since the February 2022 Russian invasion. In the months leading up to the event, Men’s Health reports on the ground to find out how—amid so much uncertainty and adversity—three Olympians train during war and what bringing home a medal would mean for them and their country. What remains clear: The stakes have never been higher, the training routines have never been tougher, and the grit has never been stronger.
Oleh Kukharyk
27, Sprint Canoer
ON THE OPEN water of the Stuhna River, a 25-minute drive from the Ukrainian Olympic base in Kyiv, Oleh Kukharyk and his teammate Igor Trunov sit in a two-person sprint canoe on a gloomy April day as they wait for their coach, Oleksandr Simonov, to blow his whistle. Kukharyk and his team of four once trained in Dnipro, a city in eastern Ukraine on the Dnipro River, but the war has made that impossible. Dnipro is about a three-hour drive from the southeastern front line in the Zaporizhzhia region, and the river has become a dangerous place where the sportsmen might be targeted while training. Though the Stuhna is thought to be safer, seeing rockets and drones soar across the sky is still considered “normal.
“You just watch and think, I hope they shoot [the missiles] down,” says Kukharyk, who’s competing this summer in his first Olympic Games, which he’s been preparing for since he was 12. His lanky, toned arms are covered in tattoos, accompanied by a cluster of designs on his left leg. His head is shaved, his eyes gray like the sky. “I hope that missile doesn’t hit any of our critical infrastructure or residential buildings.”
Once their coach blows the whistle, Kukharyk and his teammates paddle furiously, gliding in unison in a sprint across the river. He and Trunov, who will compete in the two-person event, are in one canoe, while Dmytro Danylenko and Ivan Semykin are in individual canoes. In 30 seconds, they travel 500 meters (about 547 yards), which is how far they’ll race in the Olympics. At this short distance, they can reach a speed of 14 miles per hour. Before taking a brief break, they pause and gasp for air, then paddle to Simonov’s small boat, where they’ve placed their water bottles, to rehydrate before resuming.
Prior to heading to the water, Kukharyk and his team trained in a small gym by the river. They laughed and joked as they went through a warmup circuit, moving from the rowing machine to bench presses to seal rows. This was one of ten sessions per week, each two to three hours long and including sets of weighted pullups (Kukharyk averages 154 pounds), bench presses (243 pounds), and deadlifts (287 pounds). He says the most important part of the team’s strength training is targeting the back, which helps them build muscular endurance for rowing on the water. The men also jog 2.5 miles around the Olympic center every morning to help maintain their cardio.
Ukraine has multiple teams in its Canoe Federation, but Kukharyk and his fellow athletes are the only four-person men’s team competing in the Olympics. They call themselves the “Energy Circle,” treating each other as family and acting as an emotional-support system during the war. Kukharyk hopes his team will bring home a medal for Ukraine (the men’s sprint canoe team last medaled in 2016), which would ensure the world doesn’t forget about his nation’s fight for freedom. But for him, the conflict hits closer to home: His father is a soldier on the front lines in Donetsk. Kukharyk tries to speak with him daily, even if it’s just a quick message from his dad letting him know he’s alive. “I worry a lot about my father when he goes to the frontline,” he says. “It’s really hard. Especially since he doesn’t have all the necessary tactical body armor that I wish he had.”
Ukraine’s military relies on civilian volunteers, like Kukharyk, for critically needed supplies. Through Instagram, he has raised money for his father to buy new items and hopes that during this summer’s Olympics he can help raise awareness about the war and garner support for Ukraine. He says that winning a medal “would demonstrate once again that the Ukrainian people are resilient. I have faith, a strong belief in our victory.”
Zhan Beleniuk
33, Greco-Roman Wrestler
WHEN ZHAN BELENIUK isn’t serving in Ukraine’s legislature as the chairman of the Parliamentary Committee on Youth and Sports, where he’s helped advance legislation to increase sports participation among young people in Ukraine since 2019, he’s training to represent the country at the Olympics as a Greco-Roman wrestler.
Beleniuk has competed in two Olympic Games—in Rio in 2016, where he won a silver medal in the men’s Greco-Roman 85kg (187 pounds) competition, and in Tokyo in 2020, where he won gold in the 87 kg (192 pounds) event. One of his fellow Olympians in Rio was weightlifter Oleksandr Pielieshenko, who was killed defending his country in May. Though they were not close, Beleniuk says he has lost multiple colleagues and friends in the war and that every time it’s happened, “it was a shock for me.” At the beginning of the conflict, Beleniuk considered enlisting in the military, joining countless other Ukrainian athletes who are fighting Russian aggression. But as a member of Parliament and an Olympian, he decided to prioritize his work and compete one last time in hope of securing a gold medal for his country.
Beleniuk trains twice a day for two hours at a time, six days a week, at the Ukrainian Olympic base in Kyiv. When Men’s Health visits him there in April, he begins with exercises like sprints, bear crawls, crab walks, and bridges. His short, muscular build matches that of the other GrecoRoman wrestlers training around him, but Beleniuk also stands out, as he’s the only Black member of the Ukrainian national Greco-Roman wrestling team. After these warmups, he moves on to technical training with his partner, Ruslan Abdiiev. Beleniuk restrains himself at first, pushing back and forth with minimal force. But as the workout progresses and the wrestling gets more intense, he begins to pick up the pace. At one point, he lifts Abdiiev off the mat and flips him behind his back with seemingly little effort, his opponent falling face-first in the process.
Suddenly, air-raid sirens start to roar. Despite the warning, Beleniuk, along with everyone else on the mat, continues to train. Though he’s a member of Parliament, Beleniuk does not have a security detail and says that here he’s “just [a] sportsman.” The team doesn’t typically retreat to the basement during alarms, though they often lose their focus. “When the guys hear the sirens, they stop thinking about any wrestling combinations,” says Volodymyr Shatskykh, the head wrestling coach. “They think about whether their families are safe. Their priorities have changed a little bit, and they no longer think about the result.”
After the mat training, Beleniuk has a break for a few hours before proceeding to the next part of his session. Shatskykh says it’s important for the wrestler to train for both strength and mobility. Beleniuk bench-presses 265 pounds and squats 287, then does biceps curls and bent-over rows with a 44-pound bar. Next, he picks up a 53-pound kettlebell and does five sets of 20 swings, finishing his training for the day.
While preparing for the Olympics, Beleniuk is learning English to help him communicate with the international community as both an athlete and a politician. He’s also working to combat Russian president Vladimir Putin’s narrative that Ukraine is a racist country run by Nazis, a claim he has pushed throughout the war, despite the nation having a Jewish president. “It’s my job to present our country like a very tolerant country and without any racism and Nazism, because Russian propaganda shares a lot of fake [information] about Ukraine in the African continent,” says Beleniuk, who identifies as Afro-Ukrainian. (His father was a pilot from Rwanda who died when Beleniuk was a child; his mother is from Kyiv.)
Although he loves his work in Parliament, as the Games approach, Beleniuk has temporarily paused his legislative duties to dedicate all of his time to his sport. The Olympics, he says, are the “main competition in the world for our sport. That’s why every sportsman [is] feeling some stress, some pressure before this competition. For me, [the Games are] a special thing because I [am] not only a sportsman but a politician. If I can do some good job for our country, get some medals, some victories ... I feel I can do this. I will try.”
Oleg Verniaiev
30, Gymnast
OLEG VERNIAIEV WAS asleep in his apartment on the Olympic training base on February 7 when he was awoken at 5:00 a.m. by explosions jolting him out of bed. Air-raid sirens frequently blare through the streets of Kyiv, alerting citizens to attacks that are often intercepted by the city’s air-defense system. That morning, however, two missiles evaded interception, and the debris from one hit a high-rise building, killing four people. In the weeks following the full-scale invasion in 2022, Verniaiev might not have been able to train for the rest of the day had the attack occurred then. Now he has grown used to living in a war zone and preparing for the Olympics even as Kyiv is under threat. “I understand I need work and I understand it’s not safe, but we don’t have [a] choice,” he says. Two hours after that attack ended, Verniaiev was on the floor of the Olympic gymnasium, ready to start his first training session of the day.
In the gym, Verniaiev glides through the air seemingly with ease. His callused hands grip the horizontal bar tightly as he flips his short, slim body through the air five times before landing on his feet in the foam pit below. Dark, thick circles are imprinted on his arms and back from a cupping therapy he recently received after an intense week of training. For Verniaiev, working toward a gold medal means training twice a day for three to four hours, six times a week, alongside the rest of the Ukrainian National Team of Artistic Gymnastics.
Artistic gymnastics is a discipline in which athletes perform short routines on various apparatuses. For men, the events include the floor exercise, pommel horse, rings, vault, parallel bars, and horizontal bar. Verniaiev specializes in the parallel bars, and as one of the country’s top artistic gymnasts, he’s expected to place well for Ukraine. His workouts consist of cardio, strength training, and gymnastic technique and include a 12-move circuit he completes in about 15 minutes (think rope climbing, pullups, back exercises,and more).
Paris will be the third time Verniaiev has competed in the Olympic Games. He represented Ukraine in London in 2012 and in Rio in 2016, where he earned a silver medal in the individual all-around contest and a gold in the parallel bars. In 2020, however, he was banned from competing for four years when an out-of-competition test revealed the illegal substance meldonium, a heart medication that’s also occasionally used by athletes to boost their performance or recovery rate. (Verniaiev insists the meldonium was placed in his food without his knowledge and that he did not intentionally consume the drug.)
During his ban, Russia invaded Ukraine, and instead of concentrating on the Olympics, Verniaiev immediately looked for ways to support his country. He began delivering aid to Kharkiv, a city in eastern Ukraine not far from the Russian border, where fighting has intensified in recent months. He has a lot of friends living there and thinks about them often. “When you read [on the] Internet about some rockets or ballistic [missiles] in Kharkiv, of course [I] think about this, because I have one of my best friends from Kharkiv,” he says. “I have a lot [of] friends from Kharkiv. You think about one million things, but not about gymnastics.” Verniaiev has also collected funds and supplies for soldiers fighting on the front lines in the Donbas region, which has been the target of Russian aggression for ten years. His volunteer work has even taken him to his hometown of Donetsk, which was invaded by Russia in 2014 and is still under Russian occupation. Seeing what the invasion has done to his home makes his “heart cry,” he says.
Verniaiev eventually appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (where the world’s athletes and sports federations can resolve their disputes), and his ban was cut in half in March 2023. Now free to compete in the 2024 Paris Olympics, he halted the majority of his volunteer work to focus on representing Ukraine on a global scale. When Verniaiev began to train again, his head coach, Gennady Sartynsky, said it was probably “the most difficult moment in [Verniaiev’s] life, and in my life.” The gymnast’s coordination was off and he weighed 152 pounds, which was considered overweight for his five-foot-two frame. “Starting with too much weight could lead to injuries, since the body and tendons aren’t initially adapted to such weight,” Sartynsky explains. “But he managed to get back into shape.” Verniaiev lost 33 pounds, enough to prepare him to compete in his first post-ban event, in Turkey last September.
Today, Verniaiev wants to make sure that the world hasn’t forgotten about the war, which garners far less media attention than it did two and a half years ago. “I chose gymnastics because here I can do my job, and in gymnastics I can help our guys much more than stay at home or somewhere .... I think it’s [the] best choice for me,” he says of his decision to compete instead of joining the military. “I speak with people [at international competitions]. I explain everything. Somebody try to help somebody [and] send money. Somebody try to say, ‘Okay, what do you need, what we can do for you?’” Living in a war-torn country gives athletes “one thousand reasons to say no” to sports, he says, but Verniaiev believes competing is a reminder that Ukraine and its people are still here, regardless of what the future holds. “Yes, we have [qualified to compete], but nobody knows if we are [going to be] alive. We try to be safe, but it’s not possible to know what’s happening tomorrow.”
This article originally appeared in the July/August 2024 issue of Men's Health.
