Tokyo 2020 Olympic high jump champion Mariya Lasitskene cannot accept the fact that she will be forced to miss the Paris 2024 Olympics, which will be held from July 26 to August 11, 2024.
“It’s impossible to reconcile this, I still can’t understand my condition regarding the Olympics. I’m a sober person and I understand the impossibility of my trip to Paris this year. But still, I don’t believe it can happen, although we already experienced it in the Rio 2016 Olympics”, answered Mariya Lasitskene when asked how she feels about missing the next Olympics.
Russian track and field athletes, with the exception of Darya Klishina, were not allowed to participate in the Rio 2016 Olympics.
“In general, I try not to return to this topic, I live with training and competitions”, concluded the Olympic champion.
Since March 2022, following the escalation of the situation in Ukraine, International Athletics has banned Russian and Belarusian athletes from competing in tournaments. On December 7 and 8, a meeting of the World Council of the International Headquarters was held in Monaco, after which the head of the organization Sebastian Coe told reporters that track and field athletes from Russia and Belarus will not be allowed to participate in the Olympic Games in Paris.
Mariya Lasitskene is a Russian athlete who specializes in the high jump. She is the Tokyo 2020 Olympics champion and three-time world champion (2015, 2017 and 2019). With her victory in Tokyo, Mariya Lasitskene became the fourth female high jumper in history (after Stefka Kostadinova, Heike Henkel & Anna Chicherova) to win gold at both the Olympic Games and the World Championships.
