Name Olena Hovorova | Role Olympic athlete | |
Olympic medals Athletics at the 2000 Summer Olympics Triple Jump Women | ||
Olena Ivanivna Hovorova (Ukrainian: Олена Іванівна Говорова; born 18 September 1973 in Izmail), also known as Yelena Govorova, is a former Ukrainian track and field athlete who specialised in triple jump competitions. She won the triple jump bronze medal at the 2000 Summer Olympics with her personal best jump of 14.96 metres. She represented Ukraine at the Olympics in the 1996, 2000, and 2004 triple jump competitions – the first three Olympic competitions for the discipline. She also competed at five consecutive World Championships in Athletics from 1995 to 2003.
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She won the triple jump gold medal at the Summer Universiade in 1997 and 1999 – the first time an athlete had retained the title – and also won the bronze medal at the 1997 World Championships in Athletics. Although she often made the top-ten at competitions, she rarely reached the podium at major championships. A silver and a bronze from the European Cup in Athletics and a bronze from the 2001 Goodwill Games are the other significant medals she garnered in her career.
Early career
Hovorova began competing in 1991 and took her first junior medal (a bronze) in the triple jump competition at the 1992 World Junior Championships in Athletics. She began making her mark in the senior ranks a few years later with appearances in the finals of the 1995 IAAF World Indoor Championships and 1995 World Championships in Athletics.
She attended her first Olympic Games the year after, performing at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, and she finished ninth in the triple jump final with a jump of 14.09 m. She remained overshadowed by compatriot Inessa Kravets, who won the gold medal. She was sixth at the 1996 European Athletics Indoor Championships, but Hovorova did manage to win the silver medal in the 1996 European Cup in Athletics that year.
First world medal
The 1997 season represented a breakthrough for her: starting with an indoor personal best of 14.13 m for seventh place at the 1997 IAAF World Indoor Championships and going on to win her first major medal later that year at the 1997 World Championships in Athletics. A new personal best jump of 14.67 m was enough to secure the bronze medal in the absence of Kravets. She won the triple jump gold at the 1997 Summer Universiade, and closed the year with a fourth-place finish at the 1997 IAAF Grand Prix Final.
After an uneventful 1998, in which she finished sixth at the 1998 European Athletics Championships, she retained her Universiade title at the 1999 Summer Universiade – the first athlete ever to do so. She did not demonstrate similar form at the major competitions that year, however, finishing tenth and seventh respectively at the 1999 IAAF World Indoor Championships and 1999 World Championships in Athletics.
Olympic bronze
Following a strong showing with an indoor personal best of 14.55 m for fourth at the 2000 European Athletics Indoor Championships, she took advantage of Inessa Kravets' suspension for steroids use to assert herself as the top Ukrainian by jumping a personal best of 14.96 m for the bronze medal at the 2000 Summers Olympics triple jump contest. The following year she won another bronze for a jump of 14.25 m at the 2001 Goodwill Games. She failed to maintain this form and registered sub-14-metre jumps at both the 2001 World Championships in Athletics and the 2002 European Athletics Championships, clearly out of medal contention at both competitions.
She regained her form for the following year, recording a jump of 14.81 m at a minor meeting in France and going on to take seventh at the 2003 World Championships in Athletics (14.38 m) and sixth at the inaugural IAAF World Athletics Final (14.46 m). She jumped a decent 14.59 m at the 2004 IAAF World Indoor Championships, but this was only enough for eighth place in the final as Tatyana Lebedeva's world record leap of 15.36 m signified an improvement in the standard of the women's event. Hovorova upped her game at the 2004 European Cup in Athletics and won the bronze with a season's best jump of 14.78 m. This was to be her premature peak to the season, however, as a mark of 14.35 m brought her only tenth place at the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens and her final performance of the year yielded only eighth place at the 2004 IAAF World Athletics Final.