Ukraine's athletes win 10 medals at Goodwill Games
PARSIPPANY, N.J. - Ukraine completed the 1998 Goodwill Games with 10 medals - one gold, five silver and four bronze - ending up tied with Australia for eighth place overall.
The final days of the games, which featured competition in summer sports plus figure skating, were marked by the success of Ukraine's athletes in ice dancing and swimming.
In ice dancing, the pair of Olena Hrushyna and Ruslan Honcharov remained firmly in third place after the short program on July 30. The short program counts for 30 percent of the final score, and the compulsory dance, in which the duo also placed third, for 20 percent.
In the long program, which makes up the remaining 50 percent of the total score, Hrushyna and Honcharov maintained their third-place slot and thus won the bronze medal. Russian ice dancers Anjelika Krylova/Oleh Ovsiannikov and Irina Lobacheva/Ilia Averbukh took home gold and silver, respectively.
In swimming, this year's Goodwill Games instituted a points system that turned an individual sport into a team sport. In individual events, teams earned five points for a first-place finish, three for second and one for third. Winners of relay races picked up seven points.
Individual accomplishments were hardly meaningless, however, as team members earned $1,000 for the fastest time per event. If a world record had been broken the athlete would have received $50,000.
In men's swimming, Ukraine's Denys Sylantiev, swimming for the World Team, which was undefeated in the competition, consistently won the 100-meter and 200-meter butterfly in races against the United States, Germany and Russia.
The World All-Stars, comprising swimmers from South Africa, Cuba, Italy, France, Brazil, Hungary, Canada and Ukraine, defeated Russia behind games records in the 100- and 200-meter butterfly by Mr. Sylantiev. As one commentator on WTBS noted, the Russians no doubt wished the Soviet Union had not fallen apart, otherwise the Ukrainian swimmer "would have been a comrade rather than an opponent."
Mr. Sylantiev swam the 200 meters in 1:56.64 and the 100 in 53 second flats, setting two Goodwill Games records in the process. Against Germany he turned in even better times: 1:56.16 in the 200 and 52.78 in the 100.
As if that wasn't good enough, on July 31, in the final event of the dual meet, Mr. Sylantiev went on to beat his own record yet again in the 100 with a time of 52.52 against the U.S. swimmers. (He did not swim the 200 in that match-up.) His time was the fifth fastest ever recorded and beaten only by two other swimmers in the world: Australia's Michael Klim (the world record holder) and Russia's Denis Pankratov.
In other results during Goodwill Games, figure skater Yevhenii Pliuta finished in seventh, moving up one notch from eighth after he completed the long program on July 31. That event, of course, in case anyone missed the news, was won by American Todd Eldredge, with Aleksei Urmanov of Russia taking silver and his countryman Yevgeny Plushenko the bronze.
The Goodwill Games concluded on August 2.
| Olena Vitrychenko | gold | rope, rhythmic gymnastics |
| Olena Vitrychenko | silver | all-around, rhythmic gymnastics |
| Olha Teslenko | silver | beam, gymnastics |
| Zhanna Pintusevych | silver | 100 meters, track |
| Zhanna Pintusevych | silver | 200 meters, track |
| Olena Zhupina/Svitlana Serbina | silver | 10-meter synchronized platform diving |
| Valentyna Fediushina | bronze | shot put |
| Olena Vitrychenko | bronze | hoop, rhythmic gymnastics |
| Angela Balakhanova | bronze | pole vault |
| Olena Hrushyna/Ruslan Honcharov | bronze | figure skating, ice dance |
Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, August 9, 1998, No. 32, Vol. LXVI
| Home Page | About The Ukrainian Weekly | Subscribe | Advertising | Meet the Staff |