“Bravo, our Paralympians!” the whole country was saying after the Rio de Janeiro competitions, where the Ukrainians came third best in the overall medal count, winning 117 awards. These Summer Paralympic Games were the most successful in the history of our national team, although it must be noted that Ukraine shows high results at all the competitions of athletes with impairments. Our champions and Prize winners return to the fatherland with a triumph, but now that the fans’ euphoria has somewhat abated, they must not be left alone with their problems and barriers on the streets, in society, and in the office rooms of bureaucrats.
Viktor Smyrnov is one of the most titled members of Ukraine’s Paralympic swimming team. His disability is absolute blindness. In Rio de Janeiro he won silver in the 200 m individual medley SM11, and the 30-year-old swimmer’s treasury comprises a total of 15 medals – 6 gold, 3 silver, and 6 bronze ones, which he took at the Athens, Beijing, and London Paralympics. The 2014 war brought a misfortune to his house – the Donetsk-based athlete had to leave his native city. But the swimmer did not abandon sport and won medals at the 2015 world and Europe championships. Besides, he was elected to the City Council of Sloviansk, the city where he used to go to a special school and lives now. Interviewing him, we continue a series of materials on the Paralympic movement in Ukraine and the inspiring stories of athletes.
Congratulations again on outstanding achievements in Rio. What special moments of the latest competitions will remain in your memory?
“It’s a psychologically difficult condition, for I hoped for the best result. My results have significantly improved now, but, at the Games, I failed a bit in the beginning, and the heats were difficult. So I at first took fifth place three times, and only in the last day I managed to win silver. But there is Tokyo ahead, the Cup of Ukraine in December, and the world championship next year in Mexico.”
You lost eyesight when you were a child. Why did this happen? Was it difficult to “come to” after the tragedy, and why did you decide to go in for sport and choose swimming?
“I received an injury in 1995 at the age of nine. Some of my peers and I took apart a coalminer’s self-rescuer and began to play with it, and the damped potassium chloride exploded in my hands. It took me years to undergo medical treatment, and I also went to a special evening school in Donetsk. Guys would go to a swimming pool three times a week for a 45-minute-long training session and take me with them. At first, it was entertainment and rehabilitation rather than sport. Then I came to know that there was a Paralympic movement and that my fellow countryman Oleksandr Mashchenko has won a gold medal in Sydney. In 2001 I met my would-be coach Andrii Kaznacheiev, when my parents brought me to Kurakhove for a three-week training session of swimmers. The coach looked at me and suggested that I transfer to Sloviansk and try myself in professional sport under his guidance. So I’ve been seriously training since I was 15.”
What motivates you? What is the credo of your life?
“A thirst for self-improvement and development. I derive great pleasure from swimming, I like competing, improving personal results, and winning medals. That’s what I do.”
You’ve organized tournaments for disabled children. Would you like to tie you future with training children?
“I can’t imagine myself as a coach, for one must love this thing. But I’ve been holding tournaments because I myself began with this kind of competition, and I know what an impetus a tournament can be for a child. I know what you feel when you win your first medals! Those were Mykhailo Balanchuk Prize tournaments ‘Believe in Yourself’ in Makiivka organized jointly with Donetsk’s Invasport. I tie my future with further organization of such competitions, public activism, and, naturally, sport.”
You ran for parliament and are a Sloviansk City Council member now. What prompted you to go into politics?
“After 2004, when I was granted the title of Hero of Ukraine, many began to turn to me for all kinds of help, and I decided to run for councilor – first in Donetsk’s Voroshylovsky district and now at the Sloviansk City Council – in order to take part in the city life and help as much as possible the people who need this.”
Is there much work to do in a postwar city?
“Yes, a lot. I head the commission for sport, medicine, and education and try to address as many problems among the city’s young people as possible. Our latest achievement is: we have increased the number and the amount of municipal scholarships for talented young people and have bought new sporting implements for the first time in the past few years. We are planning now to install outdoor gym apparatus so that everybody could practice if he or she wishes to do so.”
What so you think about conditions for the development of Paralympic sport in Ukraine? Why do you think our national team achieved such a success?
“Firstly, leaders of the Paralympic movement in Ukraine are making an all-out effort to help us achieve high results. Valerii Shushkevych and Oksana Skuharieva organize regular training sessions and make it possible for us to train somewhere. Secondly, disabled people in Ukraine have a limited number of fields, where they can realize themselves. A healthy person can get employed and earn decent wages. In European countries, the disabled can also do so. But in Ukraine, sport is one of the few occupations to which people with impairments have real access and in which they can show themselves.”
What problems and inconveniences do you personally come across?
“Now I’ve come across the problem of housing. My house and apartment are in Donetsk [Smyrnov received a certificate for an apartment in Donetsk after the 2012 London Paralympics. – Ed.]. Now, like some other guys from the team, we live at a rented lodging place in Sloviansk. The conditions are not bad, but you can understand what it means when several people share someone else’s apartment. We have a swimming pool for training. We terribly miss the Yevpatoria base, where we used to train every summer because there were all the necessary conditions there. No analog has been established, and we have to travel all the time to Kamianske, Mykolaiv, and Brovary, where there is a part of the required equipment.”
