Illia Kovtun, who two years ago won Olympic silver in Paris under the Ukrainian flag, has now reached the top of the podium at the European all-around gymnastics championship — but for Croatia. The gymnast scored 82.833 points according to the results of his performance, UNN reports citing Inside Gymnastics. Arsenii Dukhno finished second, Daniel Marinov third.
For some, this is just a line in the tournament table. For Ukrainian gymnastics — confirmation of the loss of one of the most talented athletes of the generation, and this loss has a specific backstory.
How the decision came about
The intention to change sporting citizenship became known at the end of 2024, when the head coach of Croatia's national team announced that the gymnast and his coach Irina Gorbachova had submitted the relevant documents. The process turned out to be not quick: Kovtun himself told a Croatian publication in an interview that the process of obtaining citizenship was ongoing, so he didn't yet know when he would receive permission to compete under the Croatian flag, although he assumed it would happen next year.
The International Federation of Gymnastics put an official end to the transfer: FIG confirmed that the 21-year-old artistic gymnast changed his citizenship from Ukrainian to Croatian. The FIG Executive Committee made the decision to allow him to compete at a meeting in Lausanne on July 9-10, and according to regulations, the athlete could only debut for his new country a year later — which is why Kovtun won his first gold medal for Croatia only now.
The reason — not just the war
Publicly, the story is presented as a drama of "fleeing" the war, but the gymnast himself insisted that the motives were more complex. According to coach Irina Gorbachova, the decision was driven by disagreements with the Ukrainian Gymnastics Federation. Kovtun himself explained the transfer both by personal and professional reasons, in particular due to the support he received in Osijek, Croatia — the city where he moved at the beginning of the full-scale invasion and where he began training.
In other words: the war created a situation in which the athlete found himself outside the usual training system, and conflict with the federation and the care of the new club completed a decision that had been in the making for months.
What this means for Ukrainian gymnastics
The loss of an Olympic medalist is not just a reputational blow. It is a signal of how fragile the system is for retaining top athletes during wartime: without funding, stable conditions and trust in the federation, even the most talented seek alternatives abroad.
The question now is not whether Kovtun will return — according to FIG rules this is almost impossible in the coming years. The question is different: how many more athletes will face the same choice, and will the Ukrainian federation be able to change conditions before the next talent leaves to train simply "because they took care of him there"?
