Yaroslava Mahuchikh on making history while her country is at war: ‘I want to win gold for my people’

When Yaroslava Mahuchikh competes, she does so with added weight on her shoulders.

“I want to win gold for my people,” the high jumper says. “A lot of soldiers watch or read the news and they write to me: ‘Thanks for representing Ukraine.’ Because of them I have the opportunity to represent my country and (keep) our country alive.”

Born in Dnipro, eastern Ukraine, in September 2001, the majority of Mahuchikh’s professional track and field career has been intertwined with the Russia-Ukraine War, the biggest ground war in Europe since World War II. Russia first attacked in 2014, but the war then escalated four years ago when Russia started a full-scale invasion on its neighbor, attacking the Ukrainian capital Kyiv and the city of Kharkiv in February 2022.

A month after that February invasion, Mahuchikh competed at the World Indoor Championships in Belgrade, Serbia, and won her first global title with a 2.02 meters clearance. Having been a teen sensation — she won silver at the 2019 World Championships with an under-20 world-record jump of 2.04m, and took bronze at the 2021 Olympics — this gold took the then-20-year-old to new heights.

Three more global titles have followed, including Olympic gold in 2024. She’s the youngest ‘grand slam’ high jumper by six years — holding the Olympic, world championship and European crowns indoors and outdoors by the time she was 22. Only two other athletes — Mariya Lasitskene (28) and Stefka Kostadinova (31) — have achieved that feat.

She’s a five-time European champion (three times indoors) and, at the upcoming edition in Birmingham, England, which starts today, Mahuchikh has the chance to emulate Spaniard Ruth Beitia as a three-time continental gold-medal winner. The championship record of 2.03m should be under threat, too.

“I’m going there to protect my title,” she grins over a video call.

Yaroslava Mahuchikh celebrates winning the women’s high jump at the World Athletics Indoor Championships in Poland in March. (Kirill Kudryavtsev / AFP via Getty Images)

Russian athletes will not be in Birmingham. They are still excluded by governing body World Athletics, a stance which “hasn’t altered,” according to president Sebastian Coe last month. But the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has provisionally lifted its suspension of the Russian Olympic Committee, opening the door for their participation under the Russian flag at the 2028 Los Angeles Games.

“When I saw this news, I was pretty shocked because nothing has changed in our world since 2022,” Mahuchikh says.

“For us Ukrainians, it was really tough. I’m really thankful to Coe because he supports Ukrainian athletes and he has a strict position.”

The IOC’s policy change is especially pertinent for Mahuchikh. High jump is a sport historically dominated by eastern and central European nations. Of the 88 women who have jumped 2.00m or above, nearly half are from that region — 14 are Russian and seven are from Ukraine.

“We were talking, us girls, about why we have so (many) competitive high jumpers and, truly, we don’t know,” she laughs. “It’s just in Ukraine, high jump is really a national event.”

In March, there was a Ukrainian high jump double at the World Indoor Championships in Torun, Poland: Gold for Mahuchikh in the women’s event, while Oleg Doroshchuk claimed the men’s title.

“I’ve come back to the shape that I was in before the 2024 Olympics,” Mahuchikh says. “I feel it with my technique, I feel my speed.”

“I have big goals,” she adds. “At my first Olympic Games (2021), I won a bronze medal. (From) the second one I have gold. At the third (2028), I would like to win gold with an Olympic record.”

Winning gold in L.A. would make her only the second woman to retain the Olympic high jump title, replicating the feat of Romanian Iolanda Balas in 1960 and 1964. Meanwhile, the Olympic record of 2.06m was set by Russia’s Yelena Slesarenko in 2004.

“I wrote my name into the history of track and field,” she says of her success two years ago. “But I want to make it again.”

Mahuchikh’s training camps typically take place in Estonia, although she is speaking to The Athletic from Belgium as she puts the finer details on her preparations for this week’s European Championships, where she will first be in action on August 13 during qualification for Saturday’s final.

She is close to her season peak, which in training terms means one high jump session per week, half of what she was doing at the start of the year.

Training also includes the hurdles and long jump, events she competed in as a child.  “When I met my coach, Tetiana Stepanova (in 2011), I thought that I’d be a hurdler,” she says.

Now she uses those disciplines to improve her runway speed, completing sprinting drills with the hurdles spaced at different distances. That is to mimic how she transitions from big steps early in her run-up to short steps before take-off.

The last step “should be short and fast,” she says, “because this is physics.”

Mahuchikh explains that her golden year in 2024 owed to a run-up tweak. That season, she won nine of the 10 competitions she entered, including European and Olympic gold, and a third Diamond League title. She also cleared 2.10m to break a world record which had stood since 1987. Her only defeat? Silver at the World Indoors.

“It was so risky,” she says of the change in approach. “Because I had nine steps on the runway and I jumped like that for five years. It was working. But we decided that I have more speed and the power to have two more (steps).

“When we did it in training, it was good. Then, after three training sessions, I could not even jump 1.85m. It was ‘what the f***, really?’” She puts her hands on her head, imitating the disbelief she had at the time.

“My coach said, ‘We’re not changing back. Yaroslava, please change your mind’. I felt comfortable but I needed to find this balance. I found it, and it gave me the world record and (Olympic) gold.”

Yaroslava Mahuchikh won Olympic gold in Paris on countback (Andrej Isakovic / AFP via Getty Images)

Her main recollection from 2024 is how hard it felt. “All the focus was on the Olympics,” she says.

She had to overcome heel problems at the start of the year, disrupting her preparation ahead of the World Indoor Championships, then hamstring trouble came before the European Championships in June. Against the advice of some close to her who wanted her to prioritize the Olympics, she nevertheless competed at Stadio Olimpico in Rome.

“I’m a top athlete, I went there to represent my country,” she says. After repeated trips to the hospital to help manage her hamstring, she won the European title by four centimeters with a 2.01m clearance.

A month later came the Diamond League in Paris. The aim: to better her personal best of 2.06m.

“I didn’t expect the world record, and my coach didn’t expect it, because of the injury. I just said, ‘OK, jump,’” she says.

She achieved a personal best with a second-time clearance at 2.07m. “A brilliant jump,” is how she describes the national-record mark which lasted just a few minutes.

Her world-record jump, made at the first attempt, owed to that longer run-up. She powered down the runway with big strides and pumping arms, then shortened her final two steps. Like a coiled spring, Mahuchikh took off, contorting herself so aggressively her mouth was wide open. Every sinew stretched.

She had so much height from her run-up that she only tickled the bar. She bounced off the mat and then ran with her hands over her mouth, equal parts elation and disbelief. Kostadinova’s 2.09m mark had stood since the 1987 World Championships, and had been considered one of track and field’s untouchable world records.

The irony? The greatest jump in history is not even her favorite. “If I technically awarded the jumps, I think 2.07m was better than 2.10m.”

The day after her world record, Russia hit Ukraine with a deadly missile attack and her joy quickly dissipated. “No record will bring joy while Russia attacks my country every day, kills our soldiers, and takes the lives of children and their parents,” she wrote on Instagram.

She made an even bigger statement at the Olympics, clearing the first four bars without any failures, the highest of those being 2.00m, to win gold on countback and become Ukraine’s third Olympic champion in track and field, following Inessa Kravets (triple jump, 1996) and Nataliya Dobrynska (heptathlon, 2008).

“If I reflect now, this is so impressive,” she says of that year.

“For me, it’s really important to show the whole world that we are Ukrainians, that we are strong and we continue fighting for independence, for liberty,” she adds.

It’s why she will jump for gold in Birmingham, so that the Ukraine flag can fly atop the podium once again.