EUGENE, Ore. — In an interview four years ago, 16-year-old Ukrainian high jumper Yaroslava Mahuchikh was asked to name her sporting hero.
"I like watching Maria Lasitskene," she replied.
Lasitskene is the Russian high jump queen, who at the time had won back-to-back outdoor world championships and was in the midst of a 45-meet win streak. She's since added another world title and an Olympic gold medal, and she's one of nine women in history to clear 6-foot-9 — or jumping over LeBron James.
The women's high jump final at the World Athletics Championships is Tuesday night at Oregon's Hayward Field, and this is where their career arcs were supposed to intersect: Lasitskene at 29 and three years removed from her personal best, and the effervescent Mahuchikh at 20 and just reaching the height of her powers.
Except they won't. Lasitskene isn't here. No Russian athletes are here.
And maybe, probably, they shouldn't be, but not for the reasons they aren't.
If you want to enact a blanket ban of the entire Russian delegation, do it for revelations of a nefarious state-run doping apparatus and continued defiance of universally accepted testing protocols. Not because their government invaded a neighboring country, as horrific as the daily images from Mariupol and Kharkiv are.
It's a noble cause. It's also a slippery slope.
In late February, four days after Russian missiles began exploding in Ukrainian cities, International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach recommended a ban of all athletes from Russia and supportive Belarus under the guise that it was for their own good, that event organizers "could not guarantee their safety at international competitions." World Athletics immediately adopted it for its signature meet that has nearly 2,000 athletes from 192 countries.
The real reason: Ukraine refused to compete against Russians, making it an us or them proposition.
"At previous competitions we've talked," Mahuchikh said of her idol. "But when the war started, she didn't write me. … She didn't write to anyone: 'How are you? Are you OK? How is your family?' They must understand that Russia is a terrorist state. In my country, people were just enjoying their lives. Now they sit in basements, they hear bombs, it's so terrible.
"They must understand it's not possible. If they compete, I won't compete."
Here's the problem, though: Where do you draw the line? And who draws it?
There are currently five other armed conflicts in the world that have killed at least 10,000 people in the past year, and 17 more that have killed between 1,000 and 10,000, and 19 more than have killed between 100 and 1,000 — some of them civil wars, some of them involving terrorist or paramilitary groups, but many of them sanctioned by governments.
Do you ban Saudi Arabian athletes because their government is fighting a proxy war in Yemen, bombing innocent citizens, killing thousands? What about Syria? Or Myanmar? Or the Tigray War in Ethiopia, Eritrea and Sudan?
Or what about the United States when it had thousands of troops in Afghanistan and Iraq?
Or what about human rights? Seventeen of the 20 countries ranking at the bottom of the Human Freedom Index are in Eugene this week. On Monday night, Yulimar Rojas won the women's triple jump for Venezuela, which is ahead of only Syria on the 165-nation list.
Or what about the NHL? If you're banning Russian high jumpers because of the war in Ukraine, are you OK with booting Alexander Ovechkin and the 56 other Russians in the league?
Two weeks ago, I asked Willie Banks, a triple jumper from Oceanside who competed in two Olympics but was robbed of a third because of the U.S. boycott of the 1980 Moscow Games, if the Russians should be banned.
Long pause.
"That's a tough question for me," Banks, who sits on the World Athletics Council, finally said, "because in my heart of hearts, I'm steadfast that athletes should be able to compete because I was part of that (1980) boycott. On the other hand, I understand that, if we're going to use sports to create peace, we have to take responsibility and we have to pressure people to understand if you do things against world peace, there should be consequences.
"It just pains me that we have to put our athletes through this dichotomy. There are something like 37 wars going on in the world right now. I looked it up, because I was like, 'What are we doing?' But we choose the ones that, I guess, mean the most."
I asked several high jumpers for their opinion about the absence of Lasitskene and her Russian teammates. A Brit twice said, "No comment." A Swede waved me away and kept walking. A Jamaican didn't know why she wasn't here.
Australia's Eleanor Patterson, though, took on the question like the high jump bar.
"It's a hard question to answer, I'm not going to lie," she said. "You're seeing both sides of the story. You're not seeing the whole story at the same time. It's never nice to see someone of such high talent and accolades not be here. But at the end of the day, sport has become so political. You would not want it to, but it's become a platform and unfortunately what's going on the world is not OK, having spoken to the Ukrainian athletes and hearing their hardships.
"Obviously, the war that's going on right now is very public and it's highlighted. It's unfortunate that other wars aren't as highlighted. It's unfortunate that we as a society have pushed things aside and not brought to light other wars. But I would never want to take lightly the decision to exclude an entire nation."
Lasitskene appealed to Bach himself, writing the IOC president an open letter that was shared on social media.
She referenced the Olympic Charter, which guarantees "every individual must have the possibility of practicing sport, without discrimination of any kind" and "mutual understanding with a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play." It also requires that sports organizations "shall apply political neutrality."
Lasitskene didn't hold back.
"Any decision taken should bring results," she wrote. "What you did was not to stop the war, but on the contrary, it gave birth to a new one, around and inside the sports, which is impossible to contain. I have no doubts that you don't have the courage and dignity to lift the sanctions against Russian athletes. Because in this scenario you would have to admit that all these months the IOC Charter was violated by you."
Then you see Mahuchikh in her pig tails with her meticulously painted eye shadow, half blue, half yellow in the colors of the Ukrainian flag. You hear her talk about her hometown of Dnipro, where her father and grandfather stayed behind. You hear how over the weekend six missiles were headed for the city, four were intercepted but two exploded.
It's heartbreaking.
It's complicated.
It's a slippery slope.
