Ukrainian athletes won four medals at the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics, including one gold, one silver and two bronze, within just hours on Aug. 4.
Ukraine now has 11 medals and is ranked 37th in the official medal count by country.
Ukrainian Greco-Roman wrestler and lawmaker Zhan Beleniuk, earned Ukraine’s first gold medal at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics after defeating Hungarian Viktor Lorincz in the men’s Greco-Roman 87-kilogram final.
Though a winner of a silver medal at the 2016 Rio Summer Olympics, Beleniuk has never earned Olympic gold before.
Beleniuk beat his opponent with a score of 5:1. To celebrate the victory, the athlete did traditional Ukrainian dance hopak right at the arena.
“I’ve come a long way. I started training at the age of nine, now I’m 30 years old, and finally, it happened – I took the Olympic gold,” he said.
Beleniuk combines an athletic career with politics. He is a member of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s 245-member Servant of the People party in parliament.
Minutes prior to Beleniuk’s triumph, another Ukrainian Greco-Roman wrestler Parviz Nasibov received a silver after losing in the finals of the men’s 67-kilogram category. Iranian wrestler Mohammadreza Geraei took gold.
It was Nasibov’s first Olympic Games. “I’ll come back stronger,” he said after the loss.
Wrestler Iryna Koliadenko also won a medal in her Olympic debut. Koliadenko beat Latvian wrestler Anastasija Grigorjeva 3:1 in the bronze medal match in the women’s freestyle 62-kilogram category.
A day prior, Koliadenko lost the semi-finals to Aisuluu Tynybekova from Kyrgyzstan. Tynybekova eventually lost the final to Japanese wrestler Yukako Kawai.
Other than wrestling, Ukrainian duo Anastasia Savchuk and Marta Fedina won Ukraine’s first medal in artistic swimming.
Savchuk and Fedina finished third with 189.4620 points. The artistic swimming women’s duet competition winners are Svetlana Kolesnichenko and Svetlana Romashina, representing the Russian Olympic Committee, who earned 195.9079 points. Chinese duo Huang Xuechen and Sun Wenyan came second with 192.4499 points.
The 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics will run through Aug. 8. Ukrainian Suspilne Sport online media and UA:Pershyi television channel broadcast the event for free.
