The Island provided Anzhelika Terliuga, the Tokyo Olympic karate silver medallist in the women’s 55-kg. kumite class, some tranquility and relief from the brutish reality of what is taking place in her home country of Ukraine.
Terliuga, on a teaching tour of North America, conducted a clinic for young participants at Kenzen Karate in Victoria on Sunday.
“We are from Odessa, which is currently being bombed every night by the Russians,” she said, in a statement, through Richard Mosdell, chief instructor of Kenzen Karate.
“It is incredibly loud, the electricity sometimes shuts out so we have to train on the mats with flashlights on, and one of the dojos in our group was destroyed by a Russian missile that crashed into the building. Luckily this happened very late when no kids were there.”
Terliuga and her coach and husband, Volodymyr Zaretskiy, need special permission from the Ukrainian government to leave the country for international competitions or seminars. Their clinics have taken them from Victoria and Vancouver to Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. Zaretskiy needs to promise to return and have his name entered in the weekly draft of eligible men.
“They said at home in Odessa they go out hoping to train at the dojo each evening and not have to go to a bomb shelter,” said Mosdell, who has served as the Karate sa国际传媒 high-performance chairman and sa国际传媒 head coach and team manager.
As well as her Olympic silver medal, Terliuga has five European championships gold medals and a World Games gold.
“Anzhelika has cracked the highest level of our sport. No Canadian won a karate medal in the Tokyo Olympics and only one Canadian even competed in the Tokyo Games. For our athletes to see how driven she is in person, is for sure going to have an impact on them,” added Mosdell, a sixth-degree black belt, who coached for 10 years at Seiritsu, the oldest Tokyo karate high school.
“We had athletes out in Victoria for her clinic from beginners to national team members and they were all really impressed and inspired by her story of staying positive despite what she has gone through. If we can support Anzhelika’s elite athlete journey, while also giving her a break from the war by visiting us in quiet Victoria, even better.”
