Yaroslava Mahuchikh

Mahuchikh began competing in the high jump at the age of 13 and made tremendous progress in just two years. With her personal best of 1.92 m, she won the gold medal at the 2017 IAAF World U18 Championships in Nairobi at the age of 15 by the greatest margin ever. She established an unofficial world record for a 15-year-old and matched the championship mark achieved by her countrywoman Iryna Kovalenko in 2003.

With a clearance of 1.89 m, she won the high jump competition at the 2017 European Youth Olympic Festival in Gyr, a few weeks later. Mahuchikh set a new championship record in 2018 by clearing 1.94 m to win the gold medal by 10 cm at the European U18 Championships. She achieved a combined height of 3.87 meters in October to win the gold medal in the Youth Olympic Games in Buenos Aires. In stage two, she set a new personal best of 1.95 meters. A month after winning the Youth Olympics, Mahuchikh extended her personal best to 1.96 m and tied the World U18 record at an annual indoor event in Minsk.

Mahuchikh equaled Vashti Cunningham’s U20 World record with a 1.99 m jump at the Miloslava Hübnerová Memorial in Hustope during the 2019 indoor season. She set an outdoor personal best of 1.96 meters during the outdoor season, winning the 2019 Diamond League’s first meet in Doha to become the competition’s youngest-ever winner at the age of 17 years and 226 days. At the World Championships in Doha in September, she cleared 2.04 meters, winning the silver medal and shattering the U20 world record in the process. For her accomplishments in the year 2019, she bagged the title of European Athletics Female Rising Star.

Mahuchikh set a new U20 indoor world mark in January 2020 with a leap of 2.01 meters in Lviv, which she later shattered by clearing 2.02 meters in Karlsruhe. Mahuchikh cleared 2.06 m at Banská Bystrica in February 2021, the highest any woman had jumped indoors since 2012. At the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics, she won the bronze medal in the high jump competition in August. She later went on to take home the silver and gold medals at the European and World Championships in Munich and Eugene, Oregon, respectively. At the Brussels Diamond League competition in September, she won the high jump with a record-breaking 2.05 m, which is also the national record in Ukraine.

Yaroslava Mahuchikh was born in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine, on September 19, 2001. Her parents, Oleksii Mahuchikh and Olha Mahuchikh, raised her. While neither of her parents were involved in athletics, they were involved in other sports. Her mother was a professional gymnast, while her father enjoyed kayaking. She also has an elder sister who practiced both karate and athletics. As a result of which, Mahuchikh  got into the sport by following her sibling.