Turning the pages back... August 11, 1996 (08/13/00)

Turning the pages back...

August 11, 1996

Four years ago, The Ukrainian Weekly summed up the results of the Centennial Olympic Games in Atlanta which, as our correspondent on the scene, Roman Woronowycz, reported, marked "Ukraine's entry into the family of nations." Ukraine finished a very respectable 10th - an unexpectedly good finish, as in the final medals count Ukraine found itself behind such powerhouses as the United States, Germany, Russia and China, and one ahead of Canada. What star gymnast Lilia Podkopayeva and company did in Atlanta surpasses even what Oksana Baiul had done in Lillehammer.

The Games had begun with Sergey Bubka of Donetske, who was expected to win gold in the pole vault, proudly carrying in the flag of independent Ukraine. They concluded with Olympic champion Volodymyr Klichko of the Kyiv region, who scored a major upset in the world of super heavyweight boxing, as flag-bearer at the closing ceremonies. A Weekly editorial noted that the fates of these two athletes reflected Ukraine's over-all fate in the Atlanta Olympics. Some of the expected winners did not fare as well as expected (e.g., Mr. Bubka could not compete due to injury); but some of the athletes who took home medals had not been expected to do so (Mr. Klichko, for example, was not among the top 10 athletes listed by the magazine of the National Olympic Committee of Ukraine, Olimpiiska Arena).

And there were many others who finished just out of the running in fourth place: Andriy Skvaruk, hammer throw; Vita Pavlysh, shot put; Vasyl Yakoliev, cycling, points race; swimmers Ihor Snitko, 400-meter freestyle, and Svitlana Bondarenko, 100-meter breaststroke; Stanislav Rybalchenko, weightlifting 99 kg; Greco-Roman wrestlers Ruslan Khakymov, 57 kg and Petro Kotok, 130 kg; Viktor Yefteni, freestyle wrestling, 48 kg; the men's 4x100-meter relay team; the women's basketball team; and yes, even Ms. Podkopayeva, who almost won a fourth gymnastics medal to add to her two golds and one silver when she placed fourth in the uneven bars.

These finishes told us about Ukraine's emergence as a sports power.

And, there was yet another message from those Olympics: Ukraine is a proud nation, one with a long history belied by its young age as a modern-day independent state. Ukraine's citizens watched their athletes compete in Atlanta, and they saw the Ukrainian blue-and-yellow being raised and heard the Ukrainian national anthem played nine times as gold medals were presented. And, Ukrainians around the world were proud, too - after all, these were their countrymen, representatives of their ancestral homeland, competing "faster, higher, stronger" (as the Olympic motto says) among the best athletes from around the globe.

Source: "Olympic successes" (editorial), The Ukrainian Weekly, August 11, 1996, Vol. LXIV, No. 32.

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