1996: THE YEAR IN REVIEW: Summer Olympics: Ukraine debuts (12/29/96)

1996: THE YEAR IN REVIEW

Summer Olympics: Ukraine debuts

Podkopayeva, Klichko, Oliynyk, Serebrianska, Sharipov, Kravets, Taimazov ... These are just some of the names that gave Ukraine prominence in the field of sports in 1996 and made its debut as a free nation at the XXVI Summer Olympics, held in Atlanta in July, an unqualified success.

The 1996 Olympic Games, which celebrated 100 years since the Games were renewed, were the pre-eminent sporting event of the year. With 23 medals, nine of them gold, Ukraine took 10th place in medal totals, finishing ahead of countries such as Britain, Canada, Brazil and Poland.

The Ukrainian team arrived in the United States on July 6, after a send-off by thousands of Kyiv residents on Independence Square, which featured rock bands and an address by Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko. Until the beginning of the Games on July 19 they trained in Carrollton, Ga., the Ukrainian pre-Olympic training site.

Once in Atlanta, spunky Lilia Podkopayeva led the team of 235 athletes with two golds and a silver medal in gymnastics. The 4-foot-9 inch dynamo did not get her fair share of the limelight, however. She was constantly overshadowed by the United States team, which took the team gold, but failed miserably in the individual events. The press gushed over Americans Shannon Miller, Dominique Dawes, Kerri Strug and Dominique Moceanu, none of whom surpassed Ms. Podkopayeva in terms of either performances or medals.

When it came to crunch time in the individual all-around finals, Ms. Podkopayeva showed that she would not be stopped. In the final event, it took a misstep by her nearest competitor, Mo Huilan, to assure the 17-year-old her gold. But Ms. Podkopayeva had everything to do with it. In the floor exercise she had given an explosive performance, which the judges rewarded with a 9.87, the highest mark of the day.

The Americans Miller and Dawes made disastrous mistakes, both stepping out of bounds in the same event, which cost them medals.

The first gold medal for Ukraine was captured by Viacheslav Oliynyk of Mariupil on July 23, four days into the competitions. Strongman Timur Taimazov was the first to set new Olympic and world records when he lifted 235 kg. in the clean and jerk in the 108-kg. weightlifting class. He broke his own mark by 1 kilogram.

A surprise to many, but not to those who had followed his quick rise through the amateur ranks, was the golden victory of boxer Volodymyr Klichko in the heavyweight class on the final day of the Olympic competitions. In the preliminary bouts he had upset two favorites, Laurence Clay-Bey of the United States and Russian Alexei Lezin, before meeting Paea Wolfgramm of Tonga in the finals. Mr. Wolfgramm said after his defeat that he wasn't used to the Ukrainian's style. "They have a different style. Tonight he outboxed me."

The biggest disappointment was Sergey Bubka, whose string of bad luck at the Olympics continued in 1996. He withdrew from competition in the pole vault hours before the contest began and placed the blame on a strained Achilles' tendon. The only person to clear 20 feet and the odds-on gold medal favorite said doctors had told him he needed three to four months of complete rest. In 1992 Mr. Bubka had done badly, failing to qualify for the finals. At Seoul in 1988 he won the gold medal.

The press seemed to have its eyes only on the Americans throughout the Atlanta Games, an impression that members of the foreign press also carried. NBC was especially guilty of maintaining a narrow viewpoint. One example given in The Weekly editorial from August 4 is a photo of the three medal winners in the shotput, two Americans and the Ukrainian bronze medalist Oleksander Bahach. As the caption commented, "He did not share the NBC spotlight, however, as the unabashedly jingoistic network's cameras focused on the two Americans, leaving Bahach out of the picture. Was there no room for Bahach on our TV screens?"

And then there was the bomb, which changed everything at the Games. The bomb exploded in Centennial Park a week into the competitions. One night the park was jammed, everybody was partying and enjoying themselves. The next, police were everywhere, the park was closed and a tension hung over the city of Atlanta and the Olympic Games.

Besides that tragic incident and the truly messed-up transportation system for the press corps and athletes, the heat, which the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games was less than forthright about when it pitched Atlanta as the cite of the Olympics, was unbearable. The first week the temperature averaged in the mid-90s, which had fans, athletes and the press steaming in several ways.

Such temperatures made one wonder how come in the Olympic Village the Ukrainian athletes could only think of borshch and pampushky. On a day that the temperature hovered around 95 degrees? But that's what they told us. There was a definite lack of Ukrainian dishes in the Village cafeteria and an obvious desire by the Ukrainian team for some Ukrainian home-cookin'.

A week and half into the two-week competitions, a contingent of Ukrainian Olympians who had finished competing returned to Ukraine, but not before they were feted by the Ukrainian Association of Georgia at the lush residence of businessman Ihor Prockow.

Nope. They did not have borshch and pampushky there either. But there was enough of everything else so that all who attended went home satisfied.

Among those who attended were Minister of Sports and Youth Valerii Borzov. He and Laryssa Barabash-Temple of Atlanta were the major coordinators in obtaining the financing and making the arrangements that allowed the Ukrainian team's stay here to go off without a hitch.

Financing the squad was a particular problem. In May, the National Olympic Committee of Ukraine (NOC-Ukraine) was informed that the budget crisis of the government would limit the size of the team and the money it would receive. On May 13, Volodymyr Lytvyn, the president's assistant chief of staff, said that at the time only 20 percent of the Olympic budget was available - this two months before the Games were to begin.

Funding for the Ukrainian Olympic movement was provided not only by the government but by Ukrainian organizations in Canada and the U.S. After the completion of the Games, on August 15 the Ukrainian National Association received a letter of gratitude from Mr. Borzov for the $15,000 in total that the UNA donated to the NOC-Ukraine. Another major fund-raiser for the NOC-Ukraine was the Philadelphia Regional Olympic Committee, which collected more than $50,000, and the Ukrainian Sports Federation of the United States and Canada. All told, Ukrainians in the United States and Canada donated $574,212.24 to the National Olympic Committee of Ukraine, according to figures released by Ms. Barabash-Temple. There were additional donations by the International Sports Corp., which handled ticket sales and covered the cost of the hospitality package, and the donation of an arthroscopic surgery unit by Dr. Kurt Chambless and the Memorial Orthopedic Hospital of Chattanooga, Tenn.

Ms. Barabash-Temple, who worked tirelessly in the last months leading up to the Games, also was a tremendous help in obtaining accreditation for The Weekly from Ukraine after our yearlong effort seemed to be on the verge of failure. Nineteen days before the Games were to begin we received a phone call from the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games that our documents had been received from Ukraine and that we were fully accredited.

Ms. Barabash-Temple, along with Bob Young of the Carrollton Chamber of Commerce, was also largely responsible for coordinating a training site for the Ukrainian athletes in Carrollton, about an hour's drive west of Atlanta. West Georgia College donated student dormitories and the college's athletic facilities, and even built a new, Olympic-caliber track. The Olympians arrived in Carrollton several weeks before the Games began for final training and acclimatization.

Athletes and coaches with Ukrainian ancestry also represented countries other than Ukraine at the 1996 Olympics. Among them, Yaro Dachniwsky, goaltender for the U.S. handball team; Joanne Malar of the Canadian Olympic swimming team; Coach Mike Burchuk, Canadian women's volleyball coach; Taras Liskevych, U.S. women's volleyball coach; and Rick Oleksyk, U.S. men's handball coach.

Other sports venues

For all his Olympic problems, Mr. Bubka had success as well in 1996. At the Millrose Games held in Madison Square Garden in Manhattan on February 2, he took first place in the pole vault, one of the few meets where he had not claimed success. The 32-year-old Ukrainian set a new games record with his vault of 19 feet 2 1/4 inches, which at that time was the highest jump of the year.

Mr. Borzov, the sports minister, was also in New York that week to be honored with nine of the 11 winners of the Olympic 100-meter dash who are still living. Mr. Borzov won the gold in Munich in 1972 in both the 100-meter and 200-meter dash, and a bronze in Montreal in 1976. He joined well-known figures such as Bob Hayes, Hasely Crawford and Linford Christie at the Jesse Owens Memorial Trophy Awards on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the 1936 Olympics held in Berlin, Germany, in which Mr. Owens competed. This year's award winner was Michael Johnson, who would go on to more success at the Atlanta Olympics five months later.

Not everything in Ukrainian sports centered on the Olympics or Olympic figures, although it seemed that way. In basketball, Vitaliy Potapenko on June 26 became the second player from Ukraine drafted by a National Basketball Association team, the Cleveland Cavaliers, who picked him 12th over all (Alexander Volkov played for the Atlanta Hawks a few years back). The 6-foot-10-inch 21 year old, whom the Associated Press dubbed the "Ukraine Train," played college ball at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, where he averaged 20.7 points and 7.4 rebounds in his senior year.

In soccer, Ukraine's Kyiv Dynamo found itself surrounded by more controversy. On April 19 the Union of European Football Associations reinstated the team after it served seven months of a three-year suspension from all European competition because the Dynamo coach had allegedly attempted to bribe a Spanish referee to fix a match against a Greek team. A month earlier, on February 11, the team had contributed $42,000 of earnings from a soccer tournament it had won in Moscow to an organization of widows and orphans of Russian soldiers who had died in Chechnya.

Knowledge of the donation provoked Ukrainian diaspora leaders in North America to fire off a letter to Minister Borzov condemning the move. He released a statement expressing anxiety and anger over the contribution.

There has been contention that the donation was a bribe to a Russian vice-president of the UEFA to intercede on the team's behalf to have the ban on play lifted, although that charge has not been substantiated.

In figure skating, Ukrainians maintained a presence in the top 10 in three of four categories. At the World Championships held in Edmonton on March 17-24, the ice dancers Irina Romanova and Ihor Yaroshenko placed fifth, the highest ranking for any Ukrainians. In the men's category Viacheslav Zahorodniuk placed sixth and was criticized by TV commentators for a technically strong but artistically listless and emotionless program. Other Ukrainian showings were: Dmytro Dmytrenko -16th, men's; Olena Belousovska and Serhiy Potalov - ninth, pairs; Olena Liashenko - 12th, women's; Yulia Lavrenchuk - 17th, women's; Olena Grushina and Ruslan Honcharov - 19th, ice dance.

A week prior to the competition the team had practiced in Vegreville, Alberta, the home of the world's largest pysanka. On March 9, they presented an exhibition, and in one of the performances the entire group came out in traditional Ukrainian folk costumes.

Ukraine also had only limited success in the World Junior Hockey Championships held in Massachusetts. After beating the United States in the first game, 4-3, the team did not win another game, losing three times in round-robin play and two more times in the relegation play-offs, all by a combined score of 9-20.

But in yachting it did better. At the SPA Regatta held in Medemblink, Netherlands, on May 26, the Ukrainian women's team of skipper Ruslana Taran and crew member Olena Paholchyk finished second in the 470 class. The other Ukrainian boat, crewed by V. Kravchun and N. Hapanovich, placed 11th. In the men's division, Ihor Matvienko and Yevhen Braslavets placed sixth, with the team of A. Overchuk and V. Honcharov coming in 31st.

In the Biathlon World Championships, held on February 10 in Ruhpolding, Germany, Ukraine found more success, taking the bronze in the 4x7.5-kilometer relay thanks to Olympic bronze medalist Valentyna Tserbe and teammates Tetianna Vodopianova, Elena Petrova and Olena Zubrilova.

Finally, one more item on the Olympics. On February 29, Reuters reported that Andrei Medvedev, the tennis star from Kyiv, had made a bid to represent Russia at the Summer Olympics. It quoted an interview with Mr. Medvedev in the Moscow newspaper Sports Express in which he said, "I grew up in the Soviet Union, my homeland was the Soviet Union, my capital was Moscow, even if Kyiv was my hometown. But everything is so complicated, it is hard for me to say what it means now," he explained. Mr. Medvedev ended up not competing in the Olympic Games in Atlanta. His sister, Natalia, however, did compete for Ukraine in women's doubles.