Russia's war has killed 462 Ukrainian athletes and coaches. How DARE the Olympics let in Vladimir Putin's pariah state, writes IAN HERBERT

He was born on the same day as our youngest and could have been my child, or yours. A young man of abundant optimism who found a calling in sport, pursued it around athletics venues across eastern Europe and, had events taken a different course, would have been walking into the Paris Olympics Opening Ceremony as a competitor, on Friday.

He was Volodymyr Androshchuk, from Suslivtsi, a village of wheat, soya and barley fields in western Ukraine, and he seemed destined for the agricultural life until one of his junior schoolteachers was struck by his speed and pointed him in the direction of athletics club in the nearby town of Letychiv.

He was intrigued by the cinder running track and long jump pit there. He began to throw shot-put and javelin, won Ukraine’s national junior decathlon championships in 2018 and 2019 and pulled on a Ukraine national vest – those now unmistakable colours – to compete in under-18 and under-20 European Athletics Championships.

A clip of him competing in the pole vault at Ukraine’s national junior indoor championships will have a ring a familiarity to any parents whose children have taken up athletics. The drafty, rather deserted stadium with its many empty plastic seats. Volodymyr’s unrestrained roar – part-relief, part-delight - echoing around the place when he clears the bar. A personal best.

It was not without reason that he dreamed of representing Ukraine at the Paris Olympics. ‘He was called the great hope of Ukrainian athletics,’ the Berlin-based Ukrainian journalist Anastasia Magazova related in a report for the German paper Die Tageszeitung this week.

It wasn’t to be. He was injured in an awkward pole-vault landing and turned his focus to javelin, yet the sense that he was somehow ‘not contributing’ enough in life led him to volunteer for the military fighting Putin - launching grenades for the Second Battalion, Sixth Company, of Ukraine’s 95th Brigade. He was 22 when he died during an operation to retake land near the eastern town of Bakhmut in January last year.

Of course, Volodymyr has not been the only one. Since Russia’s invasion, 462 Ukrainian athletes and coaches have been killed and Magazova’s report details the stories of five, with devastating understatement. There’s Alina Perehudova, a 14-year-old weightlifter who had been preparing for the 2023 European Championships when she and her mother, leaving their house in Mariupol, were hit by shrapnel from an explosion and died instantly. Trampolinist Anastasia Ihnatenko had just rented an apartment in Dnipro with her husband and their one-year-old son when a Russian missile hit the building and killed her.

They and many more will be remembered by their compatriots and friends bearing Ukraine’s flag to the banks of the Seine. Look out for that contingent - who arrive in France with hopes of perhaps 20 medals - because their grace and class shame an International Olympic Committee (IOC) which has handed Russian athletes the chance to compete at these games, and Putin the chance to exploit the propaganda potential if they medal.

The IOC’s spineless cover for allowing 19 Russians in is that they may neither bear their country’s name and flag, nor hear its national anthem. In an insult to our intelligence, they tell us that analysis of these athletes’ social media posts and public statements prove they have ‘no active support for the war.’

A study by Global Rights Compliance, a human rights group, suggests that Russian cyclist Alena Ivanchenko has 'liked' several pro-war posts on social media and that her tennis-playing compatriot Elena Vesnina has validated posts about 'military feats' of Russian soldiers killing Ukrainians and posts displaying the pro-war 'Z' symbol.

Some of Russia’s weightlifters and cyclists have declined invitations to compete in Paris, citing ‘humiliating’ and ‘unsportsmanlike’ IOC selection criteria. How painful for these delicate souls. Do, please, stay away.

There is no place for Russia at the Olympics. Nothing less than an absolute boycott, absolute pariah status, will suffice for a nation which for years has laughed in the face of sport’s most glorious and precious collective movement. Before the 2016 Olympics, there were revelations of a coordinated, state-sponsored doping programme to ensure that Russia won more medals than anyone else at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. Now, Putin’s state-sponsored outlets are publishing material warning the Paris games are at risk from terrorism.

Ukraine stands high above them here. From Jesse Owens single-handedly destroying Germany’s attempt at proving Aryan superiority in 1936 to US sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos protesting their country’s treatment of black citizens in 1968, the Olympics have carried a torch for freedom and humanity. These Games will be no different. They are so timely in this respect.

The memory of Volodymyr Androshchuk will be preserved by Artur Felfner, competing in the decathlon for Ukraine, whose own reflections of his former team-mate and friend are included in a fine recent New York Times piece. There were tears in Felfner’s face when, on a snowy day in Letychiv, 16 months ago, he attended Volodymyr’s funeral. Debate was raging at the time about Russia being permitted to compete at the Paris Olympics. ‘I don't know how they can let them compete,’ he told the Reuters agency that day. ‘There’s no place for them there.’

For the would-be Olympian’s family, there is only the dull ache of loss. ‘He was always in a hurry to get somewhere, in a hurry to live,’ says Volodymyr’s sister, Lyudmila. ‘He should still live and live. So many plans for the future that will never be realised.’

England role not for an opportunist 

For a man who has mastered the art of never seeming to say anything remotely interesting, Eddie Howe really is as smooth as silk. 

Witness the tautology in the way he exploited links between him and the England job to lay down a marker in the power struggle currently ensuing at Newcastle. ‘This is all about Newcastle. It's not about England… so, as long as I am happy, I have not thought of anything else,’ he said, last week. 

England require a manager for whom, to borrow from Gareth Southgate, the role is the privilege of a lifetime. Not an opportunist looking for some useful leverage. Thanks, but no thanks, Eddie.

Sadness at West Indies diminishment 

Wonderful to see Shoaib Bashir’s five wickets vindicating England’s faith in youth, but I don’t believe I am the only one for whom an overwhelming sadness at West Indies diminishment transcends any immediate glee about England’s success.

Granted, Windies’ destruction has, to some degree, been self-inflicted. But the ICC has seen to it that a small oligarchy of three wealthy cricket nations - India, England and Australia - have become richer, while the have-nots, including West Indies, are left to get by on scraps as best they can.

One of the great sporting films 

I’ve just re-watched Fire in Babylon, truly one of the greatest films to have emerged from the field of sport. 

The story it tells of how the great West Indies side of the 1970s used cricket – their colonisers’ game – as a devastating expression of their independent spirit is so inspirational that you wonder how the team and Test cricket on the islands can have fallen so far in 40 years. 

I, for one, won’t be looking for vast English supremacy at Edgbaston from Friday.