From Ukraine to Nerja: the women's Paralympic volleyball team's seeking refuge on the Costa del Sol
The squad, including one player who had two limbs amputated following a grenade explosion, is preparing for the 2026 world championship and dreaming of the 2028 Games
There are no sirens or drones in the sports hall in Nerja, on the eastern Costa del Sol, just the thud of the ball hitting the floor, the coach's orders and the hard work of nine women who, despite everything, continue to train. The Ukrainian women's Paralympic volleyball team has found in the Axarquía a place where they can prepare their sporting future away from a war that in their country conditions absolutely everything.
Nerja has become, for the third time in the last two years, the place chosen by the Ukrainian Paralympic teams for their preparation, after the men's volleyball team and the men's athletics team.
There are nine players, all of them with disabilities, led by coach Maloivan Yaroslav, with Pogoretska Olma as second coach. They come with recent results that endorse their competitive level: bronze at the European Championships held this year in Hungary and with an ambitious horizon despite the difficulties. In 2026 they will compete at the world championships in China, a key event on the road to a place at the Paralympic Games in Los Angeles in 2028.
The Ukrainian women's national team won Paralympic bronze at London 2012 and fourth in Rio de Janeiro 2016. However, the war runs through every conversation. Antonina Zhuk, who acts as English translator for SUR, explains that training outside the country is not just a sporting matter. "The situation in Ukraine is very tough, there are drone attacks all over the country. We can't train normally, there is a lot of fear," she says. "In the hospitals and on the streets you see a lot of people with injuries and in fear," she adds.
The road to Los Angeles
In Nerja, time is measured in work sessions, in strength exercises, in technical repetitions from the floor. Because Paralympic volleyball is played sitting down, but it demands extreme physical and mental strength. Among the players is 25-year-old Lakatosh Yaroslava from the Ukrainian city of Poltava. When she was 16, in 2016, she suffered total amputation of both legs above the knees after a grenade thrown by a stranger exploded.
"She is strong, she has a strong heart," Zhuk says of Yaroslava, as she watches the training. There is no drama in her tone, only realisation. As if resilience were already a natural part of the vocabulary. Alongside her other players like Filon Anastasia or Sheremet Luclmila train, all with different stories, but with the same common denominator: sport as a way of personal and collective reconstruction.
During the sessions in Nerja, the team works on technical, physical and tactical aspects, but also on something more difficult to quantify: normality. Being able to train without interruptions, without having to take refuge, without thinking about the next attack. The Nerja sports pavilion thus becomes, for two weeks, a space of emotional refuge, in which the players can concentrate solely on their preparation. Here, the war is out of the way, at least for a few hours, more than 4,000 kilometres away.
The road to Los Angeles 2028 will not be easy. The players themselves know this. The difficulties of training in their own country, the travel, the constant uncertainty and the emotional strain are obstacles in addition to the sporting demands. But if this training camp in Nerja shows anything, it is that the goal is still alive. That the team is still competing. That Ukrainian women's Paralympic volleyball is not giving up. Far from the front line, in the Axarquía, these nine women continue to build a future from the floor of a court.
