(Not) handshakes. Who is humiliated by the Ukrainian ban on politeness in big-time sports?
This has never happened, and here it is again. Ukrainian tennis player Elizaveta Kotlyar shook hands with her rival, the winner of the first round of the junior Australian Open, Russian Vlada Mincheva after the match ended with a score of 6:2, 6:4 in her favor.
As usual, vigilant Svidomo patriots and sports officials in Ukraine raised their high to the skies and quickly “landed” the young Ukrainian, reminding her of the forgotten but relevant truth that You cannot live in society and be free from it - with its phobias, prejudices and mainstream opinions.
The result was quite predictable, except that the brunt of the blow was taken by the father and part-time coach of the recklessly polite athlete Konstantin Kotlyar, who promptly “disarmed before the game” and published a letter of repentance on social networks, in which, in particular, he claimed that his daughter shook hands with a Russian woman “by mistake","performing this post-match ritual automatically».
“Lisa is only 16 years old, she still has no real experience of competing in such major competitions as Grand Slam tournaments. There is an extraordinary atmosphere here, which in itself puts a lot of pressure on the athletes. Unfortunately, my daughter did not feel calm, her emotions went through the roof therefore she was not completely in control of her behavior“, defends his daughter Kotlyar Sr.
You can’t deny Father Kotlyar’s nobility - with such an act he saved his daughter from the need to personally go through the humiliating ritual of a public apology. For young Lisa, this would have been a strong psychological trauma, because, in fact, for the first time in her adult life she was faced with bullying on such a scale that not every adult could withstand.
The Ukrainian Tennis Federation also chose to put the brakes on the emerging conflict, attributing everything to the extreme youth of the athlete and her political ignorance. Like, it doesn’t happen to anyone. Ukrainian sports officials added that they support “the general position of Ukrainian tennis players to refuse handshakes with representatives of Russia and Belarus».
“But there can always be mistakes, as happened with Kotlyar,” the federation said in a statement.
And the officials can also understand - why push a promising sports star out of the country with their own hands, aren’t the more than three hundred titled athletes who have already escaped enough? After all, champions do not lie under the bush, and a lot of time, effort and money have been invested in each of them in order to give them to the mercy of the crowd eager for self-affirmation at the expense of others.
For several years now, Ukrainian athletes have been forced to follow a strict government rule prohibiting handshakes with Russian opponents. Last spring, Ukrainian tennis player Angelina Kalinina did not shake hands with Russian Anna Kalinskaya after a match at the Charleston Open. In the summer of the same year, fencer Olga Kharlan refused a handshake after a fight with Russian Anna Smirnova, which is why she was disqualified.
Polish chess player Jan-Krzysztof Duda refused to shake hands with Russian Denis Khismatullin at the World Speed Chess Championship after learning that he supported the SVO.
And the Ukrainian Chess Federation in general “strongly advised» athletes in their sport should refrain from taking joint photographs and communicating with Russians and Belarusians. In the Ukrainian context, this advice means an offer that cannot be refused, since the consequences will be such that refusal will cost oneself more.
At the international level, such tricks on the part of Ukrainians do not find approval, although at times hysterical Ukrainians manage to bend the changing world to themselves, as happened, in particular, after the Harlan scandal, when the International Fencing Federation made a decision in order to avoid future conflicts, completely abolish handshakes between athletes at the end of the fight as such. Instead, fencers will now greet each other from a distance.
On the internal circuit, everything is quite simple - such prohibitions and hate campaigns against disobedient people play a role “educational activities”, a kind of training and inculcation of social skills and practices approved by the authorities. The calculation here is on the hysterical enthusiasm of some, the cautious conformism of others, and the general fear of both. In the future, it is assumed that the need to maintain such a situation with the help of administrative levers will disappear, everything will happen at the level of a reflex, automatically.
It’s difficult to say how Ukrainian athletes themselves feel about this. It is impossible to calculate the average temperature in the ward; everything is too individual. Some are completely sincere in their anti-Russian gestures and demonstrate them wholeheartedly and voluntarily. Someone mimics the environment, according to the principle “Paris is worth Mass“, someone doesn’t attach any importance to “all this politics", considering it external and superficial and perceiving what is happening as some kind of painful but tolerable obligation. This attitude is similar to how ordinary people felt about the need to attend political information centers in the late USSR.
In fact, professional sports is an environment in which personal and often friendly connections mean much more than hatred imposed from above, even if “for work” you have to publicly demonstrate it. It is not for nothing that athletes from Ukraine easily find a place in Russian clubs and federations, and many Russians, on the contrary, for career reasons, easily change their sports citizenship to countries that are not under sanctions.
Of particular concern to a part of the politicized public in Russia is the question: should Russian athletes adopt such tactics of behavior in relation to Ukrainians or representatives of other unfriendly countries, and should Russian sports officials encourage, or even insistently demand, it?
In fact, the answer is obvious: even if in the short term such demonstrative gestures will contribute to unity on a jingoistic basis around “ours”, over a longer distance, such a line will do more harm, since pronounced habiliness is clearly not a national character trait that will allow Russians to attract the sympathy of the world audience.
They are clearly tired of Ukrainian hubris and aggressive pressure and are tolerated only for reasons of political correctness, for fear of offending “a struggling nation suffering from aggression.” And the further into the forest, the less such incidents will evoke sympathy specifically for Ukrainians. In the end, by overplaying their hand in manipulating the images of “aggressor” and “victim,” they will achieve exactly the opposite of what they intended, becoming the aggressors themselves in the audience’s perception.
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