Turning the pages back... March 3, 2002 (02/26/06)

Turning the pages back...

March 3, 2002

Four years ago, our correspondent at the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Editor Andrew Nynka, wrapped up his coverage of the Games by writing: "For all their effort and sacrifice prior to the start of the 19th Winter Olympiad in Salt Lake City, Utah, Ukraine's athletes returned home disappointingly medal-less."

Following years of rigorous training and preparation for the games, the best result Ukraine's athletes could muster was a pair of fifth-place finishes in men's freestyle aerials and women's 30-kilometer cross-country skiing. However, the fifth place results came as a pleasant and unexpected surprise for the competitors, highlighting a bright spot in Ukraine's disappointing final medal count of zero.

In the men's freestyle aerials event, Stanislav Kravchuk (no relation to Ukraine's former president Leonid Makarovych) told The Weekly that he expected to do no better than sixth place, but was shooting to place in the top 10. "To be one of the top five in the world is a very amazing feeling for me. I did not expect it. I am very proud of my achievements and feel wonderful to be here competing with the best athletes in the world," the six-year national team veteran Kravchuk said of his performance upon moving up from 10th place to fifth in his final jump of competition.

In the women's 30-kilometer cross-county event it was Valentyna Shevchenko who, on the final day of Olympic competition, pulled a last-minute surprise out of her hat by taking fifth place in the women's endurance event with a time of 1:33:03.1. An Olympic veteran of the 1998 Winter Games in Nagano, Japan, Shevchenko's best prior performance was a ninth place finish in the 4x5-kilometer relay and a prior career-best sixth place finish in the 5 kilometer classic at the 1999 World Championship.

In other events at the 2002 Olympics, Team Ukraine's athletes finished farther down the list, with the only other top-10 finishes being turned in by luger Lilia Ludan, who placed sixth; the men's 4x7.5 relay team in biathlon, which came in seventh; and ice dancers Elena Grushina and Ruslan Goncharov (whose names we then transliterated as Olena Hrushyna and Ruslan Honcharov), who took ninth place.

Source: "Ukraine's Olympians leave Salt Lake City medal-less," by Andrew Nynka, The Ukrainian Weekly, March 3, 2002, Vol. LXX, No. 9.

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