Russian biathlete Irina Kazakevich told she took an Olympic medal off the shelves for the first time in a year and a half to meet a young fan with cerebral palsy.
At the 2022 Beijing Olympics, Kazakevich won a silver medal in the women’s relay.
— Does already having an Olympic medal give you extra confidence?
— At the end of the Olympic Games, you still had to take your medal with you to certain meetings. After that, I didn’t bother her anymore [с полки] almost a year and a half. And relatively recently, in July, I went to see a boy with cerebral palsy and he is very fond of biathlon. And instead of cartoons, he watches races over and over again. He can’t speak, but when we came with Tamara (Derbusheva), he understood that I was Irina and she was Tamara. And for the first time in a long time, I took out a medal and went up to this guy so he could take a picture and hold it.
And so, that medal sits somewhere, and you try not to remember that something has already been done. Maybe that gave me confidence at the end of the Olympic season. And then the end of the season was very easy for me. I was accused. Of course, this load dropped at the end of the season and we realized that there would be no more international performances.
“It’s probably after stories like the one with this boy that we realize that it’s not all in vain.”
– Yes! Because sometimes you think, well, why are you training now, if you could compete with the best in the whole world, and you spend these years in isolation… Of course, there are a lot of girls here too everyone wants to achieve a good result, but we all understand that the international level is a little different. However, you do it for the sake of the fans, for the enthusiasm, the support and the atmosphere that reigns during the competitions.
When I went into the sprint, I told myself: just enjoy what you have now. Still, people come out to applaud, especially since there are so many people watching now. It’s good that biathlon is broadcast on television. And it is precisely for this reason that it is now worth loading up and performing, because for some biathlon is a holiday. That is, people on weekends do not go to the movies, but watch biathlon, get together with the whole family, and this is important. Playing in front of people is also part of this whole life,” Kazakevich told .
All races of the stages of the Alfa-Bank Commonwealth Cup and the Russian Cup will be broadcast live on the channel, and broadcasts will also be available on the websites matchtv.ru and sportbox.ru.
Source : MatchTV
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