Daily air raid sirens cannot deter the fighting spirit of Dnipro’s young athletes determined to give their all in Paris

Oleksandr Zheltyakov gazes across the pool and points towards the hundreds of yellow seats that run along its flank. He has cast his mind back to December 2019, when he was 14 and won his first Ukrainian championship in front of a delighted home town crowd at Dnipro’s Meteor facility.

“Just thinking about it fires me up,” he says. “It was before the war, a full stand, supporters cheering, adults, children, in a place I know so well. When you win here, it feels like you’re at a Taylor Swift concert.”