and a record set 14 years before she was born.

“I have signed the nation of Ukraine into the history of world athletics,” she said later.

As long as Steponova had coached Mahuchikh, she has repeated to her a simple truth: “It is just you and the bar.”

The bar, however, has taken on new meaning since the early morning hours of February 24, 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine.

The high jump, Mahuchikh said, “is my front line.”

On Aug. 4, that front line will stretch across the Stade de France apron for an Olympic Games women’s high jump final that for Mahuchikh, the reigning world champion and Olympic favorite, is about more than just a gold medal.

“I’m fighting for (the Ukrainian) people on the track,” she said. “I’m doing all my best on the track for my country and to show all the world we will never give up.

“I believe I have a mission to compete and show all the world we are strong people and that we will fight to the end.”

Sebastian Coe, the president of World Athletics, track and field’s international governing body, and a two-time Olympic gold medalist at 1,500 meters for Great Britain, made a similar statement when he visited Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv and attended a track meet the last weekend in June. Coe invited Zelenskyy be his guest at the Olympic track and field competition in Paris.

Russia was banned from the 2021 Games after the country’s state sponsored doping program was exposed. More than 300 Russian athletes still competed in Tokyo under the flag of the Russian Olympic Committee, winning 71 medals.

Russia and Belarus are banned from Paris as the result of the Putin regime’s invasion of Ukraine.

“No flag, anthem, colours or any other identifications whatsoever of Russia or Belarus will be displayed at the Olympic Games Paris 2024 in any official venue or any official function,” according to the IOC, but at least 36 Russian and Belarussian athletes, however, have accepted invitations to compete as individual neutral athletes in several sports in Paris but not track and field.

Coe and World Athletics banned athletes from Russian and Belarus from competing in international track competitions shortly after the Russian invasion, a stance Coe has not softened on.

“Nothing I witnessed tells me that the decision we’ve taken is anything other than the right decision, but the right decision on behalf of our sport,” Coe told reporters during his Ukraine trip. “I don’t make judgments about other sports.”

It is a stance that Mahuchikh appreciates and wishes the International Olympic Committee and other international sports federations would adopt.

“When I see Russian athletes,” she said, “I see everything (Russia) has destroyed.”

The ban means Mahuchikh won’t face Russia’s Maria Lasitskene, the reigning Olympic champion and Mahuchikh’s girlhood idol, in Paris.

Lasitskene, in an open letter to IOC president Thomas Bach and Coe, an IOC member, shortly after the World Athletics ban in 2022 criticized the decision, saying the organizations “chose the easiest solution … to suspend everyone because of citizenship.”

She also told Bach, “I have no doubts that you don’t have the courage and dignity to lift the sanctions against Russian athletes.”

Her former idol’s letter outraged Mahuchikh.

“We don’t keep in touch with Maria really,” Mahuchikh said. “She didn’t write with anyone. Not even a simple word: ‘How are you? Are you OK? How is your family?’ No she only writes letter (to the IOC and World Athletics). And no word for the war in Ukraine.”

Russian athletes, Mahuchikh said recently, “don’t exist for me. It’s like they died before February 24.”

Mahuchikh was asleep in her home in Dnipro in central Ukraine, the country’s fourth largest city with a pre-war population of 1 million, when she was awakened at between 4:30 and 5 a.m. by a large blast on February 24, 2022.

At first she dismissed the noise. But when she heard a second blast only moments later, she began laughing, a nervous reaction she as always had since she was a young girl when she is frightened.

“When I heard the second one,” she said, “I knew the war had started.”

She and her family were forced to flee to a neighboring village. She trained when she could at a local indoor facility in between bombings. Warning sirens sent Mahuchikh and her friends and family scurrying to the cellar several times a day.

Twenty three days after the first bombs struck Dnipro, Mahuchikh won the World Indoor Championships in Belgrade after a perilous 72-hour journey through Ukraine, Moldova and Romania to Belgrade by Mahuchikh, Steponova, Steponova’s husband and son, who is also Mahuchikh’s boyfriend.

“I didn’t know when I would come back and see my parents, my friends again,” she said.

Another Ukraine high jumper, Iryna Gerashchenko, was forced to leave her home in Kyiv so quickly that she didn’t have time to take her jumping shoes or uniform. She trained for days in tennis shoes borrowed from a teammate’s mother.

“They have assiduously made our championships, and I’m talking about a complicated journey,” Coe said referring to Ukrainian athletes.

Leaving her parents, however, wasn’t the only reason Mahuchikh hesitated to make the trip. She was also torn between competing and staying in Ukraine and helping treat the war’s casualties.

“It mixes up my mind,” Mahuchikh said. “Because one part says it’s OK, you’re going to the World Championships Indoors to show how strong we are but the second part is to maybe I should be at home. Maybe I should show help as a volunteer for the soldiers. But when we come to Serbia it’s really understood I should be here, I should talk with journalists and show Ukrainian people are strong.”

They often heard gunfire or bombing as they drove toward Ukraine’s western border with Moldova, where they were detained for five hours because of traffic and processing delays.

“Of course I was a little bit afraid because a lot of the regions where we go were bombed by Russians,” Mahuchikh said. “It was so difficult but we had to go to the World Championships and show good results.”

Mahuchikh not only won at the World Indoors but Gerashchenko placed fifth.

“I didn’t think I was doing it for myself or my medal, I was doing it for all the Ukrainian nation,” Mahuchikh said. “I want to show Ukrainian people are strong people. They never give up. Our military protects our country at home and today I protect my country on the track.”

That spring Steponova began to notice a change in Mahuchikh.

“She had sparks in her eyes,” Steponova said.

Last year she swept the World outdoor championships and Diamond League finals, each victory recognized by messages from home.

“A lot of people write me. They call me, text me to say, ‘Thank you,’” Mahuchikh said, emotion in her voice revealing the depth with which those messages have touched her.

It was the notes, the calls and Dnipro that were on her mind when she shrugged off Steponova’s advice in Paris on July 7.

Ten days earlier 12 civilians were killed in Dnipro during a Russian rocket and drone attack on a nine-story residential building. Four days earlier at five were killed and least 53 were injured when Russian rockets and drones struck Dnipro schools, kindergartens and a hospital.

“Cynical terror,” Mykola Lukashuk, regional council director for the area, said.

“I’m smiling but also in my head I know the last two weeks have been hard for my city,” Mahuchikh said. “The war has given the people a lot of emotions. I wanted to give them good emotions.”

It wasn’t just the devastation in Dnipro that has impacted Mahuchikh.

Two years earlier, she was training on the West Coast for the 2022 World Championships in Eugene when she learned that on the morning of July 9, a Russian missile exploded into the home of Daria Kudel, a champion sports dancer, and her family in Kryvyi, another central Ukraine city.

Shrapnel tore through Kudel’s heart and liver. She was rushed to a nearby hospital but could not be saved.

“She was only 20,” Mahuchikh said in an interview with the Orange County Register at the time, her, voice tailing off.

Mahuchikh then was also only 20.

“When I read this, I thought, ‘How can this be? How can it be in 2022?’” Mahuchikh continued. “I thought it could be me. Thank God.”

And so she stepped up to top of the runway in Paris, stepped up to her front line, staring down a world record that had stretched across parts of five decades, at the bar and so much more and charged forward.

“I didn’t think about the world record,” she said. “I thought about giving (Ukrainians) warm memories.

Ukrainians, she continued “have a lot of terrible news and the world record is like sunshine for them. Every time I compete, I try to give them the feeling of warmth.”