Reports on encounters with Russian tennis players: the German tennis champion Eva Lys, who was born in Kyiv
Image: picture alliance / Eibner press photo
Bombs, dead, wounded: a great power is responsible, also in sports. But it is precisely this that sends signs of hope: messages that show that not everyone is being taken in by the hatred of the Kremlin’s propaganda.
Ajona Morozova was lucky. The swimming coach, director of the Spartak sports club and regional federation in Kharkiv, was serving tea to Ukrainian soldiers when the building was hit by the Russians. Morosowa lay under the rubble for two hours before her cries for help were heard. She wrote to the Ukrainian Swimming Federation: “I’m alive, partially safe and very angry,” reports the State of Swimming website, and Morozova wrote to the SwimSwam portal: “I am angry and will continue to defend my city and country. The Russian Federation kills civilians. NO WAR”.
Others were not as lucky as Morosowa. In the first week of the war that Vladimir Putin is waging in Ukraine, athletes have died trying to keep their homeland free. Meanwhile, Kyiv-born German tennis champion Eva Lys told Eurosport on the fringes of a tournament in Kazakhstan that many Russian athletes behaved “disrespectfully towards those affected by the Ukraine war. They laugh about it, make fun of it, some demonstratively put on a tracksuit in the Russian colors.”
