From Competition to Connection: Maksim’s Journey Through Sport and Belonging

For Maksim Lopatyuk, sport was a calling, a path. After the full-scale war in Ukraine began, it became a way to cope, bring people together and keep moving forward.

When Maksim talks about how he first got into sport, he goes back to his earliest childhood memories. At five, he says, he was “put on a track and told to run.” At eight, he was “thrown into a pool and told to swim.” He recalls these beginnings with humor, as something almost inevitable for a child who grew up in a family where sport was everywhere. His father was a high-level track-and-field athlete, while his older brother ran long distances, including marathons. Medals, training sessions and a spirit of competition were all part of the landscape of his childhood in Odesa, Ukraine, where he was born and raised.

Looking back, those two simple commands seem to have foreshadowed far more than the beginning of an athletic career. Sport would accompany Maksim through every important stage of his life — from childhood and years elite sport to the recent years marked by war and forced departure from Ukraine.

Maksim grew during the difficult years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, when many families faced hardship and uncertainty. Sport quickly became more than a passion. At 12, he went to his mother and told her he wanted to leave Odesa for a sports boarding school in Mykolaiv. He was still a child but remembers that there was a very grown-up logic behind his decision.

“I went to my mother and said, ‘Mum, I’m leaving for the sports boarding school.’ It was in another city. You lived in the dormitory; they fed you there; the school was nearby, and the sports base was there too. In the 1990s, I understood very clearly that there I would have food, shoes, clothes — at least a tracksuit, a T-shirt, and trainers. There were a school, training camps, and competitions. I understood very clearly that this would also help my family.”

By 16, Maksim had already become an International Master of Sport — a high-level sporting title specific to classification systems used across the post-Soviet space and awarded to athletes who reach international performance standards. His cycling career later took him to international competitions, including more than 15 World Cups and eight European Championships. Later, between competitions and traveling, he began working with young people.

“Later, I became interested in squash and started playing as a player-coach. I worked with young people in Odesa, put together training groups, and we travelled to competitions, including Ukrainian championships and other tournaments.”

Maksim was still in Ukraine when the full-scale invasion began. By then, coaching had already become an important part of his life. For a time, trying to hold on to some sense of routine, he continued working with youth in Odesa, organizing training sessions in parks, along the seafront and on the Potemkin Stairs. The training continued, but the world around them was no longer the same. Neither was the way Maksim saw sport. He found himself turning to it for something more than just performance — and saw the same effect in the people training with him. Sport was no longer about how fast you could cycle, how many races you could win, or how far you could push your body beyond its limits. It became a way to redirect attention, release some of the emotional pressure and get through difficult days when worries and thoughts refused to let go.

“I spent eight months under missile attacks. I continued training children in Odesa — in parks, on bicycles or near the sea. Sometimes we would simply be standing together, look up and see a missile flying overhead, somewhere towards the port.”

Experiences like these do not simply disappear from memory once the immediate danger has passed or when someone reaches a safer place.

“I think many Ukrainians have the same reaction as I do: if there are fireworks somewhere or even a simple firecracker goes off, we instinctively flinch and, for a moment, the body reacts as though the danger were close again.”

An hour of training could not stop the war, but…

During the interview, Maksim took out his phone. That morning alone, more than ten air-raid alerts had already appeared. His parents are still in Odesa, while his wife’s parents are in Kyiv, meaning that even from a distance, the alerts, the news and the reality of the war remain part of their everyday lives.

“Even now, while we are sitting here, the alerts keep coming. And night after night, it is the same. Slowly, we try to adapt, but I don’t think it is ever possible to fully get used to things like this.”

Maksim remembers mornings in Ukraine when the emotional pressure was so intense that he felt he was reaching breaking point. That was when he began organizing group bicycle rides. There was no need for a complicated program. Those who wanted to join would meet at an agreed place and set off together.

“When the war started, we were living with all this every day. You would wake up in the morning, and the tears would simply come — there was this enormous emotional pressure, the alerts, that sad and heavy feeling. That was when I started organizing bicycle rides. Sometimes 20 people came, sometimes 30, sometimes even 50. We would meet, choose a route, and set off. We would go for a loop and come back. This was already during the war, in Ukraine, and it helped enormously. People came because they understood that it was an escape, even if only for a little while. Otherwise, you could lose your mind. When you are doing sport, your mind focuses on something else, and you are no longer trapped in the same difficult thoughts and emotions.”

Over time, Maksim also began to see his role as a coach differently. His experience in elite sports and his pedagogical training had long taught him that movement can change a person’s state of mind. The war, however, showed him that effect in a much more direct way.

At training sessions, both in Ukraine and elsewhere, Maksim saw children and young people arriving tired, anxious or simply overwhelmed by what was happening back home. He could not change the reality there, but for a while he could offer them a space where their attention shifted towards movement, the people around them and what was right in front of them — a few moments of enjoyment.

“Sometimes they came to training after barely sleeping all night. Their parents or relatives were still in Ukraine, and they had spent the night following the alerts and waiting for news from home. After training, though, I could see that I managed to help them disconnect from all of that, at least a little. An hour of training cannot stop the war, but it can give them positive emotions, endorphins and, for a while, distract their minds from what is happening back home. The change I see in them is not only physical, but psychological too.”

The sport he carried with him

After leaving Ukraine, Maksim first went to Cyprus. In a new place, he turned back to what he knew best: coaching. He worked with Ukrainian families, organized sessions in gyms and outdoors, and drew on experience gained across several disciplines — from general physical training and athletics to cycling. He found a few bicycles and began bringing together children from Ukrainian families.

“I wasn’t charging children anything. The adults were paying something purely symbolic — enough for an ice cream,” he says.

It is one of the moments when Maksim smiles as he tells the story. A small, almost ordinary detail, yet one that says a great deal about how he kept going, even at a time when so much else had become uncertain.

In 2023, a new opportunity brought him to Chisinau, where he began working mainly in racket sports and gradually became part of the local sporting community. Within roughly six months, Maksim says he was coaching around 70 people. About one third were Ukrainians — young individuals, couples and entire families. He did not intentionally give priority to Ukrainians. However, he believes that people who had similar experiences sometimes find one another and connect more easily.

“Ukrainians naturally come to me because I am Ukrainian too. Somehow, we are a little closer. Especially those who have experienced explosions, missiles, what war really is. Intuitively, sometimes we can simply sit together in silence. We are on the same wavelength — we already understand and feel one another without words.”

Then he adds something that subtly changes the perspective on what it means to “help”. “They are around me and I am around them. Sometimes they help me; other times I help them.”

For Maksim, the community is not built around one strong person supporting everyone else. It is reciprocal. And perhaps that is exactly why it works.

Sometimes it is enough to move alongside someone

When asked whether sport can help refugees integrate into a new community, Maksim answers with little hesitation.

“I can say with complete confidence that sport is an essential tool for integration and for maintaining physical and psychological balance. Without sport, all of this would be much harder to get through.”

For him, integration is not an abstract concept, as he had to find his own plane in a new community as well. And from his experience, it can begin very simply: in a park, with a few people and something they do together.

Sport creates a routine and gives someone a reason to leave the house. It brings people who may not speak the same language onto the same team or the same court. And, almost without noticing, connections begin to form — connections that can make a new place feel more familiar and give people a sense of belonging. In 2024, Maksim’s experience began to reach beyond his own training groups. In 2024, he completed a specialized training through a sport coaching program, focused on working with adolescents, including young people affected by displacement.

“We taught coaches and educators how to communicate with teenagers, what kind of tone to use and how to help a child coming from a vulnerable background integrate when they are facing a language barrier or other difficulties.”

These seminars addressed the wellbeing of the mentors as well, recognizing the fact that those who support others sometimes need support themselves.

Years of experience had repeatedly shown Maksim that no one can carry everything alone, and that he needs support too. For him, that support had a name: Olga.

When support finds its way back to you

In 2024, Olga, Maksim’s wife, who came from Kherson, became an important part of the community that had formed around him. She began training in squash and padel and gradually became one of the people keeping the group connected: staying in touch with everyone, stepping onto the court when a fourth player was needed, and even organizing and leading several training sessions with children. Maksim says Olga became one of the links holding the community together.

But he felt her support most strongly at home. Maksim talks about how demanding it can be to spend day after day alongside people fleeing the horrors of war while carrying the echoes of many of the same fears and worries yourself. Sometimes, after hours of training sessions, conversations and trying to lift others up, he would return home exhausted, with no energy left, as if he had given away everything he had to offer that day.

“I think Olga has been the foundation of my psychological balance. Working every day with people who are fleeing war is not easy at all. You are carrying many of the same fears and worries yourself, while also trying to support people who are going through their own difficult experiences. Sometimes, after four, five or six hours of work, you come home completely drained. But thanks to Olga, every morning I feel recharged again, as if I had a brand-new battery.”

Olga’s role in Maksim’s story is the living proof and a reminder that goes back to underlining the idea Maksim introduced before, that support is rarely one-directional. Sometimes you give it; sometimes you are the one in need of it. For someone who spent much of his life measuring performance in seconds, distances and rankings, the results he looks at today are of a different kind. They do not appear on a stopwatch, and they do not come with a medal — although perhaps it is precisely these kinds of results that deserve the most valuable medals of all.

Today, for Maksim, success comes when a child leaves training a little calmer after a difficult night. When a group of people begins meeting regularly and supporting one another. When someone in a new place finds a community where they do not have to explain everything they have lived through in order to feel understood. Or when people who otherwise might never have met simply begin moving together.

Perhaps this is where Maksim’s beginning and his present come together most naturally. Movement has always been there, but its meaning has changed with him: once, it carried him towards the next competition; today, it brings him closer to people.

At five years old, Maksim was put on a track and told to run.

Decades have passed since then. There were competitions, victories, and journeys. Then came war, leaving home and the need to start again.

Maksim is still moving forward, but there is one main difference: it is no longer just about how fast or how far he can go himself. It is about how many others he can help find strength to keep moving forward alongside him.

This story was produced by UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, as part of its work to highlight the experiences, resilience and contributions of refugees in Moldova. UNHCR works with national and local authorities and partners to protect refugees, support their access to services and help create opportunities for inclusion in the communities that have welcomed them