Ukrainian President opens new Olympic House in Kyiv

Ukrainian President opens new Olympic House in Kyiv

By Duncan Mackay

May 30 – Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych has opened a new Olympic House in Kyiv, which he said he hoped would give the country’s athletes added impetus as they prepare for London 2012.

Yanukovych, who served as the President of the National Olympic Committee of Ukraine (NOCU) between 2002 and 2005, was helped by the country’s greatest-ever athlete, Sergey Bubka, and Nina Bocharova, Ukraine’s first-ever Olympic gold medallist, who won two gold medals in gymnastics at Helsinki in 1952 competing under the flag of the Soviet Union.

“It’s nice to open the Olympic House,” said Yanukovych. 

“We have for many years worked hard for Olympians to get a roof over their heads.

“I would like to wish good luck to athletes and I’m confident that they will make us proud with their victories in London.”


Bubka (pictured above with Bocharova), the 1988 Olympic pole vault champion and now an influential member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), claimed that the seeds for building the new House had been sowed by Yanukovych while he was head of the NOCU.

The ceremony was a welcome relief for the NOCU following a week when they had found themselves under the spotlight for the wrong reasons after general secretary Volodymyr Gerashchenko was forced to resign following allegations that he had offered to sell up to 100 tickets for London 2012 to an undercover television reporter from the BBC.

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