The Ukrainian national team will be among the participants in the football tournament of the 2024 Olympics, which will be held in France next year. This is the debut of our team at the Olympic Games. Our national team won the right to play there, having successfully played at the European Youth Championship, which was held in the stadiums of Romania and Georgia. Our guys got a ticket to France by becoming semi-finalists of the European watch.
The Ukrainian national team will prepare for the Olympic tournament under the leadership of Ruslan Rotan. The squad will consist of players born no older than 2000, and there were eight such players at Euro-2023. Also, each national team will be able to include only three players without age restrictions in the application form of 18 players.
Among the many sports in the Olympic programme, football holds an honourable place. It is, in the words of former FIFA president Joao Avellange, "the jewel of the Olympics". Olympic football tournaments have been held since 1896. The first winner is the Danish team, which beat the Greek team 9-0 in Athens. Football tournaments were held at all Olympics, except for the 1932 Games, which were held in Los Angeles.
More than once changed the formula for these tournaments. That did not take into account the age limit of players, then not allowed to participate in the qualifying and final competitions (so it was at the 1960 Games in Rome and 1964 in Tokyo) players who took part in the World Cup matches. At the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, professional players were allowed to play (although their age was limited to 23 years).
In 1972 in Munich, 1976 in Montreal, 1980 in Moscow and 1988 in Seoul, the Kyiv Dynamo played in the final tournaments as part of the Olympic teams of the former USSR. There are Olympic medals in the collections of 17 of them. Alexey Mikhailichenko has a gold one, Oleg Blokhin and Viktor Kolotov have two bronze ones each.
In 1976 in the match for bronze medals the wards of head coach Valeriy Lobanovskyi defeated Brazil - 2:0. The Kyiv Dynamo players Troshkin, Reshko, Matvienko, Fomenko, Buriak, Kolotov, Onishchenko, Blokhin, Konkov and Veremeev played in our team. Bessonov and Baltacha also have the "bronze" of the 1980 Olympics.
We wish the players of the current Ukrainian Olympic team a successful performance at the Olympics in France in 2024.
Oleksandr LIPENKO for Dynamo.kiev.ua