The Tokyo Olympic Organizing Committee has officially apologized for calling the Ukrainian artistic swimming duo Russian.
“It was purely an operational mistake,” Masa Tanaka, the organizing committee spokesman, said on Aug. 5.
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 was won by 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.
“We feel like we’ve made history,” said Fedina after the competition.
During the award ceremony, the announcer confused the Ukrainian duo with Russian swimmers Kolesnichenko and Romashina, who won gold in the same competition.
Yet, the Ukrainian duo didn’t feel offended.
“We heard that we were improperly named, the flag was also mixed up, yet no one pays attention to these things,” said Fedina. “The main thing is that everything ended well.”
However, not all felt the same way.
Russia invaded Ukraine in March 2014, occupying Crimea and the eastern part of Donbas, killing over 13,000 people in the process.
Russian state television has spread anti-Ukrainian sentiment making fun of Ukrainian gold medalist Zhan Beleniuk for being a Ukrainian lawmaker and launched a commercial break as Ukrainian athletes entered the Tokyo Olympic Stadium during the Olympic opening ceremony on July 23.
As of Aug. 5, Ukraine won a total of 13 medals at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics – one gold, three silver and nine bronze.
