‘I felt the water tremble’: Ukraine’s Olympic swimmers train as bombs fall

Oleksandr Zheltyakov gazes across the pool and points towards the hundreds of yellow seats that run along its flank. He has cast his mind back to December 2019, when he was 14 and won his first Ukrainian championship in front of a delighted home town crowd at Dnipro’s Meteor facility.

“Just thinking about it fires me up,” he says. “It was before the war, a full stand, supporters cheering, adults, children, in a place I know so well. When you win here, it feels like you’re at a Taylor Swift concert.”

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There is a different soundtrack nowadays. A few minutes later, the air raid siren sounds and an employee at this famous venue, one of the main training bases for Ukraine’s Olympic swimmers, walks over to suggest we continue our conversation on that opposite side. We have been sitting beneath the row of huge windows that usually give a humid arena its sense of light and space. The panes are already in a bad way: some cracked, some taped over, others replaced by material of a different tint. Everyone knows what would happen if another rocket landed outside.

The first time, Zheltyakov was in the middle of a training session. It was March last year and Dnipro was, once again, coming under heavy Russian attack. “Thank God, it was just a little bit of damage and feeling scared,” he says. “We went out straight away and sat in the shelter.” The shockwave from a nearby missile had rippled through the water.

It startled Denys Kesil, a butterfly specialist who was practising a few lanes away, in mid-stroke. “I heard a sound that didn’t seem right, felt the water tremble and raised my head,” Kesil says. “I knew we needed to get out of the pool, you’re full of adrenaline at that moment. There were bits of debris falling and outside the window everything was black.”

On that occasion, the damage to Meteor was minimal. Life at the pool continued, with all its wartime doubts and constraints. Families brought youngsters in to use the children’s facilities. The sauna and spa offered a way to relax. Kesil, who had already represented Ukraine at Tokyo 2020, kept working towards a crack at Paris. For Zheltyakov, who was crowned European 200m backstroke champion last month and is one of the most exciting swimmers in the world, there was nothing to be gained by dwelling on a relatively near miss.

“My mum told me that, if it’s your rocket, it will catch you wherever you are,” he says. “When it’s my time, it’s my time. When it’s not, I keep swimming, training, trying to do good work. This is now how we live, it’s life for all Ukrainians. We have five-to-10 air alarms here every day and it’s impossible to cry every time. We need to help our families, our friends, and then carry on with our lives.”

When the second missile struck five months later, in the early hours of 15 August, Zheltyakov was already wide awake. “Insomnia, like the Christopher Nolan film!” he says, his face brightening. He had won European junior gold medals in the 100m and 200m, also meeting the qualifying standard for Paris 2024 the previous month, but felt stressed; the world juniors were under three weeks away and he was worried about training, unsure whether he was doing enough, concerned about fulfilling the exacting demands of his coach.

He was staying in Meteor’s inbuilt accommodation for athletes: basic dormitory rooms situated behind the far side of the pool, known as “the hotel”. Although his family home is close to Dnipro, he would join fellow athletes in basing himself here for the buildup to a championships. “I heard an explosion and made sure all the boys and girls got up,” he says. That turned out to be a strike on a nearby industrial facility; for Meteor the worst was about to follow.

“The team went down to the shelter and I went to our security desk: I knew at night-times it was a babushka and she might need help. I told her to come to the shelter with me and, while we were heading there, another rocket fell 10 or 20 metres from the pool. A bit of ceiling fell on us as we made our way.

“Some of the team were crying because they knew how close it was. In only one second, the next rocket could hit us and we all die.”

***

Take a walk outside Meteor on this warm spring day, patches of blue sky competing with light clouds, and the scars still glare. The south-western corner of the pool building is a mess of bare brickwork, loosened sheets of cladding, twisted metal and missing or boarded-up windows. The crater that appeared adjacent to the wall has been filled in, replaced by barren earth. A woman and child stand on the paving nearby, perhaps waiting to be picked up after a morning class. A mother walks her pram past the defaced edifice with barely a glance to the side.

This is just one part of a huge Soviet-constructed complex dominated by a crumbling brutalist indoor hall, designed for ice hockey, basketball and concerts, whose renovation has long been a local point of contention. Set slightly back in the woods is a 25,000-capacity bowl of a stadium where Ukraine played a World Cup qualifier against Albania 19 years ago. In 1981, 11 fans at a match between Dnipro and Spartak Moscow were killed there in a crush whose root cause remains shrouded in mystery.

There were no fatalities when the pool came under attack, although three injuries were reported nearby. Zheltyakov scrolls through his phone and alights on a series of videos: one shows the chaotic scene of his coach’s room in the dormitory, two large sheets of glass blown inwards next to the bed; another shows the site of impact shortly after sunrise, the ground caving in while smoke billows from where the night’s first hit struck; one depicts the scale of internal damage, the ceiling in the downstairs gym largely destroyed and the pool itself rendered unusable by fallen glass, concrete, plaster and assorted debris from the sinkhole outside.

“We spent the whole of the next day cleaning the pool up,” he says. “All the coaches, all the athletes. The factory nearby was burning all day.” Divers from a local group arrived to assist in the afternoon; there were about 6,000 cubic metres of water to deal with and much of the dirt had to be collected by hand.

“The day after that, we were training here again in some of the furthest lanes from the windows. The water was still a little bit dirty, but we didn’t have anywhere else to go.”

By then he had taken two of his teammates’ safety into his own hands, bringing them to the house he usually shares with his parents and nine-year-old sister. “I brought them with me for two nights because we needed to feel free after something scary like this.”

When those world junior championships came around, in the Israeli city of Netanya, Zheltyakov put it all to one side and returned with two more golds. Can anyone else have been forced to prepare like this? For most of the interview it is hard to remember that he will remain a teenager for 16 more months. There are occasional tells, such as when he likens a former coach to a character from the sci-fi cartoon Rick and Morty, but the self-command of someone used to going it alone is obvious.

He explains it has been difficult to see most of his childhood friends drift away from swimming, leaving him to one-on-one backstroke sessions in Meteor. Perhaps that independence helped him take control when lives were at risk. “I feel maybe three-to-five years older,” he says. “I’m a sportsman, I’m not at home too often and I need to develop myself from within. I think the same goes for many of us.

“For kids in Ukraine who are a few years below me I think it’s different, maybe they’re younger than their age. Not because they’re stupid, but because they’ve had Covid and now the war. All these years without good communication, with added stress, problems with families and dads, brothers, soldiers dying. We need to build schools, build classrooms, develop education and knowledge for this generation, change their future and ensure this war is not whitewashed.”

Maybe his dedication to swimming, with the palpable achievement and possibilities to travel afforded by success, has kept Zheltyakov’s youth from being snatched away. Nobody can ever relax in Dnipro, which sits in Ukraine’s industrial heartland and has been pummelled since February 2022. On 3 July, five people were killed and more than 50 wounded by a drone strike in the city.

The quieter Kesil, a former youth Olympics silver medallist who finished 21st in the 200m butterfly in Tokyo, articulates the absence of certainty. “It can be quiet for a week and then, after that, there can be lots of shells,” he says. “I try not to think about it. I’m just very sorry that so many people are dying.”

Towards the turn of the year, Meteor suffered again. This time it was 29 December and another explosion at close quarters blew out more windows. “Another clean-up,” Zheltyakov says. “My little sister came along and helped us to sweep up, along with the rest of my family.” This time the pool closed for 12 days: training while freezing winter air blew in from open sides was a nonstarter, even for competitors with these astonishing levels of resilience.

Meteor is one of the highest-profile among 518 sports facilities destroyed or damaged by Russia in the past two and a half years. Nineteen of those have been counted in Dnipro region alone, including a smaller 25-metre pool in the city’s south, where Kesil trained in his teens. There, children swim and splash noisily beneath more patched-up windows. The innocence of those early years must be maintained at all costs.

“From the age of three I’d get in the water with my older brother and we swam, dived, had so much fun,” says Zheltyakov, whose parents are swimming coaches. “I was seven when I first trained at Meteor. I remember leaving the changing room and not having a clue who my coach was or what she looked like. I ran off crying, but she found me and everything turned out well.”

He wants to ensure that goes for today’s hopefuls and, in partnership with his mother, has set up a charity to support displaced minors from the Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine in developing their wellbeing through the sport. “Swimming without cordons” may one day shape another champion but its overarching goal is simply to give others the same opportunities to thrive.

Last year, a few days before the most recent damage to Meteor, Zheltyakov was named Ukraine’s best athlete of 2023. There is little doubt about it: through the upheaval, he has recorded extraordinary results, capped by that stunning senior title in Belgrade a month after we meet. He has something special; the boy who had to clean rubble from his pool in order to make use of it may soon become a man who stuns the world.

“Reaching the Olympics is incredible for me, my club here and my family,” he says. “But it’s only the start of the journey, I’m just one of nearly 1,000 swimmers who have qualified. I’m really proud of myself, but qualifying now is just a stage in my career. I need to continue in the same way.”

Zheltyakov and Kesil are two of the five Ukrainians who will begin competing next week at La Défense Arena. “I’ll do everything in my hands to go there, do my job and represent my country in the best way,” Kesil says.

It will be a far cry from Meteor, which will have to continue in its present state despite the obvious need for expensive renovation. Water is getting into some of the exposed bricks; the building needs to retain its structural integrity so that the next breed of swimmers can perform heroics there. “It’s my home, my pool,” Zheltyakov says. “And it’s where I feel great.”