Gymnast Kovtun changed his sports citizenship — at the 2024 Olympics he won silver for Ukraine

Gymnast Ilya Kovtun, who won a silver medal for Ukraine at the 2024 Olympics, officially changed his sports citizenship from Ukrainian to Croatian on July 11.

This was reported by the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG).

What preceded

At the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion, the coach of the Croatian national team, Vladimir Madžarevic, invited Ukrainian athletes to come to the city of Osijek and prepare for the European Championship at the local sports center.

The idea was for the Ukrainians to stay there for two months. However, Kovtun, along with coach Iryna Gorbacheva, decided to stay in the city and have been living and training there for almost three years.

"I feel a moral obligation to the people in Osijek, to Vladimir, to Mr. Pipunich. They accepted me here, I practically lived with them — I slept, trained and ate in the Sokol gym. When I won the Olympic medal, I had the feeling that the local people were more happy than in my homeland," — this is how the athlete explained his decision to change sports citizenship.

Kovtun noted that there was no one specific reason — there were many and they accumulated gradually, and the decision was influenced not only by the war.

• Ilya Kovtun is 21 years old, he is originally from Cherkasy. He is a multiple European champion among juniors. At the 2024 Olympics in Paris, he represented Ukraine and won silver in the uneven bars.

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