It is a radiant spring afternoon at Koncha Zaspa. A friendly padel tournament is about to start outside and somebody has started up a barbecue for watching athletes and staff. In the canteen Iryna Koliadenko is shedding light on the pressure that mounts every morning when she rises, here at Ukraine’s Olympic training base a half-hour drive outside central Kyiv, and continues her quest for gold.
“It’s hard to prepare for competitions because I’m constantly under stress,” she says. “Psychologically it’s very difficult to withstand everything because there’s shelling, people are dying, sometimes there’s no light because the electricity goes off. There are air raid alarms all the time. It’s difficult to switch to the training mindset when you’re already psychologically exhausted and tired but you still need to go there, show some results and get better.”
