FILE – Yaroslava Mahuchikh, of Ukraine, attempts to compete in the women’s high jump final at the European Athletics Championships in Rome, Sunday, June 9, 2024. Mahuchikh’s event comes just weeks after breaking a 37-year-old world record in her event by clearing 2.10 meters during an Olympic preliminary event, also in Paris. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini, File)

Yaroslava Mahuchikh had just won the high jump competition at the Meeting de Paris, a Diamond League event, on July 7, breaking a personal best and a Ukrainian national record of 1.95 meters.

It had been a long, hot Sunday afternoon at Stade Charlety. Mahuchikh had struggled at the start of the competition and the Olympics were less than a month away. Mahuchikh’s regular coach Tetyana Steponova suggested they retire.

Mahuchikh, 22, started to agree with her coach, but smiled and changed her mind.

She asked the bewildered competition officials to raise the bar to 2 meters 10, 6 feet 10 3/4 inches, one centimeter above the 37-year-old world record of 2.09 held by Bulgaria’s Stefka Kostadinova.

“I smile, but in Ukraine the war continues,” Mahuchikh said. “People continue to fight. People continue to die, unfortunately.

“I know if I break this world record, my country will be so happy.”

So Mahuchikh swayed back and forth at the top of the high jump track as the spectators clapped in rhythmic unison, feeding not on the energy of the crowd but on the hopes of her war-torn nation. She ran down the runway, gathering speed as the clapping tried to keep up, then soared over the bar, setting a record that had been set 14 years before she was born.

“I included the nation of Ukraine in the history of world athletics,” she said later.

As long as Steponova coached Mahuchikh, she repeated to her a simple truth: “It’s just you and the bar.”

However, the bar has taken on a whole new meaning since the early morning hours of February 24, 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine.

High jump, Mahuchikh said, “is my front line.”

On Sunday, August 4, that front line will stretch across the Stade de France grounds for the women’s high jump final at the Olympic Games. For Mahuchikh, the reigning world champion and Olympic favorite, it’s about more than just a gold medal.

“I fight for (the Ukrainian) people on the court,” she said. “I do my best on the court for my country and to show the whole world that we will never give up.

“I believe I have a mission to compete and show the whole world that we are strong people and we will fight until the end.”

Sebastian Coe, the president of World Athletics, the international governing body of track and field, and a two-time Olympic gold medalist in the 1,500 meters for Great Britain, made a similar statement when he visited Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kiev and attended a track and field event in the last weekend of June. Coe invited Zelenskyy to be his guest at the Paris Olympic track and field event.

Russia was banned from the 2021 Games after the country’s state-sponsored doping program came to light. More than 300 Russian athletes still competed in Tokyo under the auspices of the Russian Olympic Committee, winning 71 medals.

Russia and Belarus have been banned from Paris as a result of the Putin regime’s invasion of Ukraine.

“No flag, anthem, colours or other identification of Russia or Belarus will be displayed at the Olympic Games Paris 2024 in any official venue or during any official event,” the IOC said, but at least 36 Russian and Belarusian athletes have accepted invitations to compete as individual neutral athletes in various sports in Paris, but not in athletics.

Coe and World Athletics banned athletes from Russia and Belarus from competing in international track events shortly after the Russian invasion. Coe has not wavered from that.

“Nothing I’ve seen tells me that the decision we’ve made is anything other than the right decision, but the right decision on behalf of our sport,” Coe told reporters during his trip to Ukraine. “I don’t pass judgment on other sports.”

Mahuchikh appreciates this position and hopes that the International Olympic Committee and other international sports federations will also adopt this position.

“When I see Russian athletes,” she said, “I see everything that (Russia) has destroyed.”

The ban means Mahuchikh will not face Russia’s Maria Lasitskene, the reigning Olympic champion and Mahuchikh’s childhood idol, in Paris.

Lasitskene criticized the decision shortly after World Athletics’ 2022 ban in an open letter to IOC President Thomas Bach and Coe, an IOC member, saying the organizations “chose the easiest solution … to suspend everyone because of their nationality.”

She also told Bach: “I have no doubt that you do not have the courage and dignity to lift the sanctions against Russian athletes.”

The letter from her former idol enraged Mahuchikh.

“We don’t really keep in touch with Maria,” Mahuchikh said. “She didn’t write to anyone. Not even a single word: ‘How are you? Are you okay? How is your family?’ No, she only writes letters (to the IOC and World Athletics). And not a word about the war in Ukraine.”

Russian athletes, Mahuchikh said recently, “don’t exist for me. It’s as if they died before February 24.”

Mahuchikh was sleeping in her home in Dnipro in central Ukraine, the country’s fourth-largest city with a pre-war population of 1 million, when she was awakened by a large explosion between 4:30 and 5:00 a.m. on February 24, 2022.

At first she waved the sound away. But when she heard a second bang a few moments later, she started laughing, a nervous reaction she had had since she was a young girl when she was scared.

“When I heard the second one,” she said, “I knew the war had started.”

She and her family were forced to flee to a nearby village. She trained when she could at a local shelter between bombings. Warning sirens sent Mahuchikh and her friends and family running to the basement several times a day.

Twenty-three days after the first bombs fell in Dnipro, Mahuchikh won the World Indoor Championships in Belgrade after a perilous 72-hour journey through Ukraine, Moldova and Romania to Belgrade by Mahuchikh, Steponova, Steponova’s husband and son, who is also Mahuchikh’s friend.

“I didn’t know when I would come back and see my parents and friends again,” she said.

Another Ukrainian high jumper, Iryna Gerashchenko, had to leave her home in Kiev so quickly that she didn’t have time to take her jumping boots or uniform. She trained for days in tennis shoes borrowed from a teammate’s mother.

“They worked hard to make us champions, and I’m talking about a complicated journey,” Coe said, referring to the Ukrainian athletes.

Leaving her parents was not the only reason Mahuchikh hesitated to make the trip, however. She also hesitated between taking part in the competition and staying in Ukraine to help treat victims of the war.

“It confuses my mind,” Mahuchikh said. “Because one part says it’s okay, you’re going to the World Indoor Championships to show how strong we are, but the second part is that maybe I should stay home. Maybe I should volunteer to help the soldiers. But when we come to Serbia, it’s really clear that I have to be here, I have to talk to journalists and show that the Ukrainian people are strong.”

They often heard gunfire or bombardments as they drove toward Ukraine’s western border with Moldova, where they were held for five hours due to traffic and processing delays.

“Of course I was a little bit scared because many of the regions we are going to were bombed by the Russians,” Mahuchikh said. “It was so difficult, but we had to go to the world championships and show good results.”

Not only did Mahuchikh win the World Indoor Championships, Gerashchenko also finished fifth.

“I didn’t think I was doing it for myself or my medal, I was doing it for the entire Ukrainian nation,” Mahuchikh said. “I want to show that Ukrainian people are strong people. They never give up. Our army protects our country at home, and today I am protecting my country on the track.”

That spring, Steponova began to notice a change in Mahuchikh.

“She had sparks in her eyes,” Steponova said.

Last year she won the outdoor world championships and the Diamond League final, each victory confirmed by news from home.

“A lot of people write to me. They call me, they message me to say, ‘Thank you,’” Mahuchikh said, the emotion in her voice revealing the depth with which those messages have touched her.

It was the notes, the phone calls and Dnirpo that she was thinking about when she ignored Steponova’s advice in Paris on July 7.

Ten days earlier, 12 civilians were killed in Dnipro during a Russian missile and drone attack on a nine-story residential building. Four days earlier, five were killed and at least 53 wounded when Russian missiles and drones hit schools, kindergartens and a hospital in Dnipro.

“Cynical terror,” Mykola Lukashuk, regional council director for the area, told reporters.

“I smile, but I also know in my head that the last two weeks have been hard for my city,” Mahuchikh said. “The war has given people a lot of emotions. I wanted to give them good emotions.”

It was not only the destruction in Dnipro that affected Mahuchikh.

Two years earlier, she was training on the West Coast for the 2022 World Championships in Eugene when she learned that a Russian missile had exploded on the morning of July 9 at the home of Daria Kudel, a champion sports dancer, and her family in Kryvyi, another city in central Ukraine.

Shards tore through Kudel’s heart and liver. She was rushed to a nearby hospital, but could not be saved.

“She was only 20,” Mahuchikh said at the time in an interview with the Orange County Register, her voice growing increasingly soft.

Mahuchikh was only 20 at the time.