SOCHI, February 21 (RIA Novosti) – Ukrainian skier Bogdana Matsotska said Friday that she and her father will join anti-government protests in Kiev as soon as the Winter Olympics end Sunday.
Alpine skier Matsotska and her father Oleg Matsotskiy, who is her coach, announced Thursday that they had decided to pull out of the Games, saying they could no longer represent a Ukraine ruled by President Viktor Yanukovych.
“We decided to stop being Olympians and become Ukrainian citizens,” Matsotska, 24, told RIA Novosti in an interview.
Speaking emotionally in Russian, she said they would like to leave Sochi immediately. But Ukraine’s Olympic Committee had convinced them to stay until the end of the Games.
At least 80 people have died in this week’s fighting between police and anti-government protesters, according to the Interior Ministry.
Yanukovych declared early presidential elections and a return to an earlier constitution that passes greater powers to parliament Friday in an agreement reached with opposition leaders to try to end a political crisis that has continued since late November.
“I want to go to Maidan, not to make war but to support the protesters and help them resist Berkut’s attacks,” Matsotska said, referring to the confrontations between demonstrators and riot police in Kiev’s downtown square.
While speaking to RIA Novosti by telephone, she said she was watching a live broadcast of the slalom competition in which she was supposed to represent her country.
“It is hard to be here and watch this, and not be there [in Kiev],” the athlete said. “This is all very worrying.”
Matsotska finished 27th in the women's super-G and 43rd in the giant slalom before pulling out of Friday’s competition.
Matsotska, a native of the western city of Kosiv, has spent most of the past four years in Austria training with her father to take part in her second Olympics. She said she went to the protests every time she visited Ukraine, most recently just after New Year’s.
“I’ve got my friends, my close ones in Ukraine and I know what is happening there,” she said, anxious that the bloodshed had erupted during the Olympics, which has encouraged a global truce between warring parties for the Games.
A spokesman for Ukraine’s delegation in Sochi said earlier that no other members had decided to withdraw from the competitions. The delegation is headed by Sergei Bubka, a pole vaulter and formerly a lawmaker with Yanukovych’s ruling Party of Regions.
Matsotska said there was no pressure from other delegation members who “accepted our decision with understanding.”
Asked whether she plans to represent Ukraine in future competitions, the athlete responded that she didn’t know.
“Before this whole nightmare ends, I can’t even think about sport,” she said.
The Ukrainian Olympic Committee has said it organized a minute’s silence for its athletes in one of the Olympic villages in Sochi in response to the bloodshed. In a possible sign of protest by athletes, pictures posted online appear to show Ukrainian flags in the Olympic village with black bands attached.
Matsotska said that originally they had wanted to wear black armbands in memory of the victims. But it was decided that this would be a political gesture that contradicted the principles of the Olympics.
