TPO – After athletes Yusuf Dikec and Kim Ye Ji (both shooting), the 2024 Paris Olympics has another athlete with extraordinary charisma. That is Yaroslava Mahuchikh. But she stands out thanks to the gold medal.
Mahuchikh lies down and relaxes while his opponent performs his routine.
Mahuchikh attracted a lot of attention when she brought a sleeping bag to the final match. While other athletes were focused on competing and the rest were watching closely, Mahuchikh… lay in her sleeping bag relaxing as if she didn’t care about how the competition was going. This girl admitted that this was the way to help her feel most comfortable, not to worry too much about the match and also not to feel too much pressure about her opponent’s performance.
“I feel comfortable lying down. Sometimes I look at the clouds. Sometimes I count from 1 to 4 and breathe in and out. It’s like a way to relax and forget that I’m competing,” said the Ukrainian athlete.
As Mahuchikh said, she usually lies in her sleeping bag and only gets up to compete when it’s her turn. In the recent long jump final, she and Nicola Olyslagers both cleared the world record 2.1m. But Mahuchikh won because she needed fewer jumps to reach the bar than her opponent.
“Winning the gold medal while sleeping”; “The sleeping beauty still won the Olympic gold medal”… Those are the beautiful words that fans give her.
But in fact, Mahuchikh’s method of relaxing in a sleeping bag is based on science.
Mahuchikh’s former coach Serhii Stepanov said the Ukrainian’s routine was based entirely on research that found that sitting or standing for too long between jumps causes blood to pool in the legs, preventing athletes from maintaining optimal fitness.
Perhaps recognizing this problem, Mahuchikh adopted the method of lying in a sleeping bag while her opponents competed. In fact, she adopted the habit in 2018, when she won gold in the high jump at the Youth Olympics .
This year, she continued her success with a gold medal. Mahuchikh has certainly created a buzz with her sleeping bag and she may be the pioneer in bringing this method to high jump competitions in the near future.
