2020 Olympic champion Mariya Lasitskene did not compete at the Games in Paris due to politics, and the victory went to Ukrainian jumper Yaroslava Mahuchikh, who took all her titles in the absence of the Russian athlete. Sport tells how one of the most colorful types of athletics lost its intrigue.
What's the matter? At the Tokyo Olympics, Lasitskene won gold in a dramatic fight with a result of 2.04 meters. Last Saturday, in a quiet corner of Tushino, northwest of Moscow, the Olympic champion at the show tournament «New Heights», which she herself organized, took a modest 1.88 and did not even win. She limited herself to the same height at the first start of the summer season called «The Path to Olympus».
If the Russian athlete had jumped 1.88 at the 2024 Olympic Games, she would not have even advanced from the qualification to the final. But it is impossible to say that Lasitskene would have been out of the fight for gold in Paris for many reasons.
Remember her sensational interview in the summer of 2022? It is clear from it that Maria, for whom her entire career since 2015 has been a continuous struggle for her rights as an athlete during the ban on Russian track and field athletes, took another disqualification, this time of a political nature, extremely hard.
Everyone who watched the Olympic champion at that time saw that she was in a bad mood. And if at first it seemed that the sharp decline in her results was a consequence of the lack of competition, then later, when her rivals gradually caught up, it turned out that the problem was not a lack of purely competitive adrenaline. More precisely, it was a lack of adrenaline, but of a different nature.
Some may consider this arrogance, but elite athletes, accustomed to competing at the world's top level, really cannot extract additional seconds in running or centimeters in jumping, realizing that they are not selected or go to any world championships or Olympic Games. Some do not want to admit this publicly, but, for example, the winner and multiple medalist of the world championships in the 110-meter hurdles, Sergei Shubenkov, did this. He, too, has not exchanged, nor even come close to the «grandmaster» 13 seconds for a very long time — and recently, like Lasitskene, he has been constantly losing to rivals in the domestic arena.
But the track and field athlete explained: this had happened to him before during his previous absence from international tournaments, and he knows that without the psychological burden of not being allowed to go abroad hanging on his feet, he would have lost a few tenths of a second. Especially with mega-top competitors in the adjacent lanes.
The European figure skating champion Dmitry Aliev described this phenomenon most clearly with a phrase that he later asked not to publish. But the mincemeat cannot be turned back, the crude analogy has diverged. And it should be emphasized that many agreed with this definition. Thus, both of our famous track and field athletes admitted in a conversation with a correspondent that they fully understand our figure skater. And there is nothing shameful in such a psychological state.
Returning to Lasitskene, as is well known, psychology is nerves, and they cause malfunctions in the body. And another reason why the Olympic champion is now noticeably fifteen centimeters behind her three-year-old self is the injury that caused her to miss the first months of the summer season.
Of course, history does not recognize the subjunctive mood, but would Maria really be fighting with herself now at heights that do not even reach 1.90, if the President of the World Athletics Sebastian Coe had not chopped off that Russians would not be at international tournaments in the foreseeable future, period? No, there would have been a different motivation, different hopes, different goals, a different path to them — and different results.
Well, about the Olympics. Now, few people will immediately remember this fact: the leader of the 2021 world season was not Lasitskene at all, but … Maguchikh. The Ukrainian athlete then had a result of 2.06 meters, and the Russian woman in the midst of training received an injury, which she urgently treated in order to have time to get at least some form before Tokyo.
But everyone remembers how it all ended. The dramatic qualification, in which Maria took the necessary 1.95 meters only on her third attempt. The no less tense final, and in the end – a victory for the ages. Which, frankly speaking, few believed in before the Olympics.
And so it is now. Maguchikh may have broken the world record that had stood since 1987 a few weeks before the 2024 Games, but on the day of the final of the Paris Olympics she did not look invincible at all. And there was no talk of 2.10. She only confirmed the well-known fact: the Games are a completely special matter. You can list the great athletes who won the world championships, but never conquered the Olympics.
In Paris, Australian Nicola Olislagers, who took silver in Tokyo under the name McDermott, would have had a little more luck — and she would have won gold, not Maguchikh. The Ukrainian was higher only in the number of attempts. Well, the final result is exactly 2 meters… This is the height that Natalia Spiridonova took in Russia this year and which Maria Kochanova is confidently approaching this summer. And which, of course, would not have become insurmountable for Lasitskene — if not for the discriminatory disqualification of Russians by World Athletics, which violated even the IOC recommendations.
Finally, I would like to ask a rhetorical question: will Maguchikh herself feel like a real Olympic champion, realizing that her main rival, who, by the way, always spoke only kindly of her, was removed from her path to gold solely because of her Russian passport? Rhetorical — because the Ukrainian athlete, alas, will be afraid to answer it honestly.