Zhan Beleniuk: ‘I will fight Russians at the Olympics but will I shake hands? No’

It is not something that Zhan Beleniuk, an Olympian and Ukraine’s first black member of parliament, says he can afford to think about now. It is evidently at the back of his mind. He has ideas on what his fellow athletes might do, and even what they should do: it might be best not to compete at all if defeat is on the cards.

But for Beleniuk, 33, the sole Ukrainian winner of a gold at the last Olympics, in Tokyo, the prospect of facing a Russian competitor at the Paris Games in his discipline of greco-roman wrestling has to be a matter for that moment, and not for now.

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“It will be a great responsibility for any Ukrainian athletes who decided to compete against a Russian,” he says from the Koncha-Zaspa Olympic training centre on the southern outskirts of the capital, Kyiv. “Because it is sport, we understand that, but that this responsibility will be, you know, times two, maybe times three, times four – because in our kind of sport we have full contact with each other and we should get a victory in this fight for our soldiers, for our country. If you lose …” He pauses. “Well, you will be … angry. When you turn back home it wouldn’t be good to say you lost against a Russian. They will be hard. Now, I don’t think about it. I only prepare and if God sends me these kinds of opponents I will fight against Russians and Belarusians – but now I don’t think.”

Beleniuk is one of more than 120 Ukrainian men and women destined to compete at what will be Ukraine’s eighth Olympic Games since the collapse of the Soviet Union. It will be the first since Vladimir Putin sought to reverse history with his full-scale invasion of Beleniuk’s country in February 2022, with the support of Belarus’s president, Aleksandr Lukashenko.

Despite the privileged access to information that comes with being in parliament in the same political party as Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Beleniuk never thought the invasion would happen. A return to war on this scale in Europe seemed such a preposterous prospect, but in the early hours of 24 February he heard the explosions from his bed. By 7am he was in the Ukrainian parliament voting in martial law.

Like 100 or more other sports men and women he ended up camping out at the Olympic base for a month. “There was a lot of different people, not only athletes, but a lot of relatives of these athletes like grandmas, mums and fathers,” he says. “And because, you know, the Kyiv region was occupied by the Russians on the north side, and our base is closer to the south so we had a good road if it was necessary to get out of Kyiv.”

It was the Russians who got out of Kyiv in the end and Beleniuk, who had taken a year off from his sport after the 2021 Games, gradually started to see the value in returning to it again.

“I have a close relationship with my coach, who is head of our national team, and I know that after this situation when Russian troops left from the Kyiv region our coach believed that sports should continue in our country and our president talked about this.”

About 400 national-standard athletes have been killed in the war. Asked if he has lost friends, he nods. “A lot,” he says. It is difficult for him to understand the decision by the International Olympic Committee to allow Russian and Belarusian athletes to compete this summer. They will have to be in neutral uniforms. They will not feature in either opening or closing ceremonies or in medals tables, and each of them will be independently vetted to ensure they have never publicly supported the Ukraine war. “But for us it is the wrong way, it is not good for us,” he says.

It is yet to be seen whether he will be drawn against his Russian rival Milad Alirzaev, 26, who won bronze in the 87kg event at the 2021 European Wrestling Championships in Warsaw. Alirzaev has, however, earned a place as a neutral athlete.

Would it be difficult for Beleniuk to control his emotions? “It will be difficult to get victory against any opponent, not only Russian, if you don’t control your emotions,” he says. “You should understand how you can get a victory and what you should do in a different moment. I think about competition only on the day of competition. I don’t think before because, you know, if you think about your official competition three months ahead from day to day I think it will be a very bad result. Mentally it is very tough when you try and do it this way.”

A duel with a Russian opponent might not be for everyone, he says. “If some athlete from Ukraine decided not to compete against a Russian I think nobody can say to him, you know: ‘No way, you should compete.’ It is their decision, their responsibility. If I am ready to win, then why not? But if you understand that you are not ready, mentally, physically, and you understand you can’t produce a good result, and show fight and give all your power and energy in this fight, then I think it is better to not compete.”

Beleniuk agrees with the recently published guidance from the Ukrainian National Olympic Committee about not shaking hands with Russian and Belarusian competitors. “If you shake hands you show your respect for these people, but we can’t show respect to athletes who support this war, who don’t talk anything against this war,” he says. “Some of these athletes asked the people to support the army. Our soldiers, I think, for sure wouldn’t understand this kind of behaviour. When the Russians every day try to kill us and you shake their hands? No.”

Beleniuk is out for a medal but at this Olympics, his last, he has another responsibility. “In Ukraine we talk about exercise minimum and exercise maximum,” he says. “Your minimum job is to talk about Ukraine. If you get a good result and can talk more, then it will only be better for your country.”