“Everything is difficult, leaving the country, returning there, training,” confide two Ukrainian swimmers

Smiling during the choreographies, the search for the perfect gesture, as all the swimmers, Maryna and Vladyslava Aleksiiva perform their duet in the water of the Olympic Aquatic Center in Saint-Denis, to music titled War stories. Franceinfo was able to meet these 22-year-old young women during a stage of the World Cup on the weekend of Saturday 4 May 2024, in Seine-Saint-Denis.

Qualified for the Paris Games in artistic swimmingthe two swimmers must still have forgotten the war in Ukraine: “In the past, I forgot to turn off notifications on my phone about alerts in Ukraine, and it stresses me out”trust one of them. “There was thunder the other day in Paris and it scared us, we wondered: but what is it?”adds the sister.

Between flight and return home, training is difficult

Marina and Vladyslava, nicknamed Vlada, did not have preparations like the others. At the start of the war in February 2022, they fled their hometown of Kharkiv, 30 kilometers from the Russian border. Only with “some clothes” and yours “Tokyo Olympic Medals”, they went to Italy with the artistic swimming team. Six months later they went home to Kharkiv, then to Kiev, says Vlada Aleksiiva. “We could have stayed abroad, but we have all our relatives in Ukraine, our parents, our grandparents, my husbandsays Vlada, it’s less stressful to be all together, to know how they experience the situation in Ukraine.”

With training in an unheated pool or a pool next to which a missile has crashed, the risks are everywhere, insists Maryna. “It’s like a horror movieshe confides. We are in the swimming pool, we hear an explosion and we have to run for shelter, sometimes not knowing where to go, for some this would be an abnormal situation. But for us it has become normal and we have to train under these conditions.”

“We will believe in our country, everything will be fine“

The two sisters will spend a few days in the south of France before a new competition in Canada, then they will travel back to Ukraine in June. For them, “everything is difficult, leaving Ukraine, returning, training.” But they willbe positive.” Their biggest dream is to win another medal in Paris this summer, for themselves and for Ukraine: “We want to believe in our country, in our soldiers, and everything will be fine.”

Reporting by Jérôme Val, editing by Carol Sandevoir.