A Ukrainian biathlete has forfeited a chance to compete in an event at the 2022 Paralympic Winter Games after receiving tragic news from home.
Anastasiia Laletina, 19, pulled out of her biathlon middle-distance sitting race on Tuesday morning after she learned that her father — a soldier in the Ukrainian army — was taken prisoner by Russian invaders, the Agence France-Presse reported.
“They beat him,” team spokesperson Nataliia Harach told the news agency. “She was very upset and couldn’t take part in the race.”
Harach said Laletina was resting and receiving support from the team’s doctor.
She also said that a Ukrainian team coach’s home in Kharkiv was recently bombed.
The Ukraine Federation of Sports for Persons with Locomotor Disabilities did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Ukrainian team is doing exceptionally well at the winter games in Beijing, despite the emotional toll of the harrowing circumstances in their country. It has racked up six gold medals so far, and is second to China, which leads the pack with eight, according to The Guardian.
Russia was banned from the games after the nation invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, shortly after the Winter Olympics wrapped up in Beijing. Russian para-athletes were sent home from Beijing on Friday — the day of the opening ceremony for the Paralympic Games — while the Ukrainian team had to escape war zones to participate, per The Associated Press.
“It’s a miracle that we have made it to the Paralympics,” Ukrainian delegation head Valerii Sushkevych told the AP.
The Ukrainian athletes are under intense stress due to the invasion of their home country, Sushkevych told The New York Times. He said their eyes are red and puffy and that they cling to their phones, hoping for updates, and only set them down moments before an event starts.
Sushkevych said the Paralympics are very popular in Ukraine, and that the competition is typically somewhat of a holiday in the country.
“[But] today, no,” he told the Times, partially through an interpreter. “I ask the athletes in the morning, ‘Did you sleep?’ I ask another, ‘Did you sleep?’ They say, ‘No, no.’ They have dull, sad faces. The mood is very difficult. We are all thinking of home.”
Still, the Ukrainian athletes have decided that competing in the international event is of utmost importance to them.
“We, the Paralympic team, have our battles in Beijing,” Sushkevych told the Times. “If we did not come here, it would be like losing position, like capitulation.”
Paralympic athlete Oksana Shyshkova, who won Ukraine’s fourth gold medal in a cross-country ski event Monday, echoed this sentiment to the Times.
“We’re here to represent our country … to glorify our country, to tell the world that Ukraine exists,” she said.