Newly arrived Ukrainians making a big splash in Canadian artistic swimming

A newcomer from Ukraine forced to flee the war in her country is having an immediate impact on Canada's artistic swimming community, as results at a recent World Cup event in Markham, Ont., demonstrate. 

Montreal's Audrey Lamothe won bronze medals in the women's solo technical and women's solo free.  Afterward, the 18-year-old gave a lot of the credit to one of her new coaches in particular, Yelyzaveta (Lyza) Yakhno.

"Lyza is very good (role) model for me. She inspires me a lot to get better and better because I think she's a very strong woman," Lamothe said. "Lyza inspires me not to be as strong as her, but just to have some piece of it to give me energy and to fight like her when I swim."

Throughout the World Cup, Yakhno was never far from her young pupil's side. Yakhno has been the assistant coach for Team Canada since she arrived in Canada in September.

The 24-year-old helped Ukraine win bronze in the team event at the recent Olympics in Tokyo. In 2018, World Aquatics named her the top artistic swimmer in the world. 

"I feel like I have lived three lives already," Yakhno said, who was forced to flee her hometown of Donetsk at age 15 after Russia invaded the eastern Ukraine city in March 2014. "My parents often had to go underground to hide themselves because of the bombs," she said. "One of the rockets even landed in the garden of my uncle's house and thankfully didn't explode."

She says her second life came when she moved to Kharkiv in northeast Ukraine, close to the Russian border. The coach of Ukraine's national team spotted her talent for artistic swimming at a competition and invited her to join, putting her on a path to the Tokyo Olympics.

After the games, she began thinking about coaching and maybe even buying