Love is in the big air for Ukrainian skier after reaching Winter Olympics final

For most athletes, qualifying for your first Olympic final would be more than enough excitement for one night. But the Ukrainian freeskier Kateryna Kotsar’s evening was just getting started

For most athletes, qualifying for your first Olympic final would be more than enough excitement for one night. But the Ukrainian freeskier Kateryna Kotsar’s evening was just getting started.

Having made the big air final, Kotsar then wrote “freedom of memory” on her glove to protest against the ban of her compatriot Vladyslav Heraskevych for wearing images of slain athletes on his helmet. And a Valentine’s Day she will never forget took another surprise turn when her boyfriend, Bohdan Fashtryha, then dropped to one knee and proposed.

“He said in Ukrainian, do I want to marry him, nothing else,” said Kotsar. “He was nervous. It was so cute. I’m still excited and can’t understand what happened tonight, because it’s two really huge things for me.”

Kotsar, who finished 11th in qualifying, flashed her sparkling diamond ring as she admitted she didn’t expect the proposal. “Usually I have some feelings that something great will happen,” she said. “Today I had the feeling, but I thought it was about making the finals. I had a bad feeling yesterday, I felt sick. For today, my biggest goal was to complete and make clean runs, but they were clean enough to be in the final. Now I am full of energy.”

The 25-year-old from Kyiv will compete against the defending Olympic champion, Eileen Gu, and 10 other athletes in Monday’s big air final. But she admitted that she would be thinking of her compatriots back home.

“You live without electricity, without heating, without the opportunity to wash your clothes and do some pretty simple things,” she said. “Usually, most of our training on snow, we do abroad, in Austria, Italy, Switzerland, but I still have enough time in Ukraine to do some gym and trampoline training.”

Last week Kotsar also made headlines when she revealed that the International Olympic Committee had barred her from using a custom helmet with the inscription “Be Brave like Ukrainians” in Milano Cortina. “About a week before the Olympic Games, I received an email saying that the International Olympic Committee considers this helmet to be propaganda, which means I cannot compete in it at the Games,” she said.

“Due to a lack of certain experience, knowledge, and probably confidence, I simply changed the helmet, and now it just has a small Ukrainian flag on it,” she added.