Osipova on training during the war: Constant sirens, constant booms but we had to keep training

Valeria Osipova comes to Liverpool as a veteran and leader of a young Ukrainian team, after her teammates Diana Varinska and Anastasia Bachynska retired this year. Despite difficulties they faced this year, the Ukrainians managed to qualified the full team to the World Championships and hope to have a good competition.

Osipova spent several months as a refugee abroad and talked about having to leave Ukraine in the beginning of the war while her family stayed behind:

“I took an evacuation train. It was madness, people were crazy. When people are panicked, they do not think about their actions. Moms would lose children, men would shove old ladies. People turned into panicked animals. It was a horrible sight. It was extremely stressful for me. I could not lie down on the train because literally all the people went on the train, all the people with their cats, dogs, rats, parrots, newborn babies, grandmas… Men tried to get on as well. It was a nightmare, like in all those disaster movies, only in real life”.

“When I took that evacuation train, I was alone, without my parents, without anyone. My mom said she would stay in Kyiv with my dad, she wouldn’t leave him. My brother stayed, too, obviously, because he’s of draft age. I went to Lviv and then, like everyone else, stood in line on the border to Przemyśl, it’s a small town on the Ukrainian-Polish border. My godfather lives in Warsaw, so I came to him. I stayed there for three days and then the physical therapist I know, Ruslan Vladimirovich, basically saved me, because he called me and said, “Lera, if you are in any trouble, you can come to Cottbus and we will host you. They took me in, I stayed in their apartment for a month, they helped me in everything, I am incredibly grateful to them, they truly saved me then. If not for them, I would’ve retired from gymnastics because I didn’t have anywhere to train and I didn’t know where I would go”.

Osipova came back to Kyiv for the national championships and the pre-Worlds training. During the competition, the rocket attacks on the city resumed:

“The preparation for the Championships was really difficult, constant sirens, constant booms, it was all very stressful. But we had to adapt to everything, get used to it, ignore it sometimes and keep training, even though everyone knew it was dangerous. On the last day of the Ukrainian Championships, we had beam and floor finals. They had to be canceled, unfortunately, because [of the rockets] and the Kyiv power station was hit, so the power outages started. My mom called me yesterday and said she needs candles, because there are no candles at the stores there, they’re without power”.

Osipova knew the situation in Kyiv was still dangerous but it was important for her to go back home:

“I was going back home. I know that my brother, my dad, and my mom are there, they all told me what was going on. Of course, I was worried about all the attacks. But, in general, I imagined how it is in my head, so it was nothing new to me. Because every morning when you wake up, you open your phone, open Telegram channels, read all the news, how’s Kyiv… I’m from Zaporizhzhia*, actually. My grandparents are there, they’re old, they don’t want to leave and they can’t leave anyway. The whole region outside the city is occupied. It’s very hard because in your head you’re constantly there”.

While abroad, Osipova stayed in Cottbus where Igor Radivilov also found refuge. Angelina Radivilova is Osipova’s personal coach and helped her recover after the break from gymnastics in the beginning of the war:

“I trained abroad with Angelina Radivilova, she’s my coach now. We’re getting along well. She would adapt to my needs because when the war started, I lived inside a subway station and then for the next two-three weeks, we lived in a basement. Obviously, I got out of shape and then I had to recover in tiny steps, to progress slowly, so I had to start from the beginning. You know, from the basics, the simplest things, the conditioning, the endurance training, it was like starting all over again”.

Radivilova stayed behind in Kyiv with the junior team and didn’t travel with Osipova to Liverpool. Osipova plans to return to Kyiv after Worlds even though she knows maintaining her training schedule will be difficult:

“We’re going back to Ukraine. I don’t know how it will go, I hope that the situation with power and heating will get better. My coach sent me a photo – it gets dark outside at 5 pm and the gym is completely dark. I guess they just came in and warmed up a bit because there was no power anywhere.”

Besides power outages, another problem is traveling to competitions. Flights stopped on the first day of the war, so gymnasts normally travel by train or bus to neighboring countries. Before Worlds, the team traveled to Warsaw to apply for UK visas, then had a 10-day training camp in Gdansk, then returned to Warsaw and flew to Liverpool:

“Traveling to competitions is a whole other story because it is really hard. If we hadn’t been in Gdansk for 10 days at a training camp, it would have taken us a really long time [to get to Worlds]. Because we went from Kyiv to Chełm, then we had to transfer to a train to Warsaw, and then we would need to get on a plane in Warsaw. The journey from Kyiv to Chełm takes the whole night, or the whole day if there are no night trains. For instance, when I went to a Bundesliga competition, it took me 33 hours to get from Ukraine to Germany, imagine that”.

*The city of Zaporizhzhia is the capital of the Zaporizhzhia region. Most of the region is currently occupied by Russia. The city of Zaporizhzhia is under Ukrainian control and is suffering from frequent rocket fire.