Biathlete of the Ukrainian national team Anastasia Merkushina commented on the 10th place in the mixed relay at the 2023 World Championships in Oberhof, Germany.
What mood did you leave today?
– In Lenzerheide, I felt that I could fight for gold, how to give all the best. I think I moved my barriers, so I went out to fight.
– What you have now shown on the track, to what extent did you manage to realize what you wanted before the race?
– Unfortunately, everything went wrong from the very beginning, because I started with the 11th number. At the very first turn, the girls formed such a fight that could end in a fall, so in order to avoid this, I slowed down, overslept the moment.
And then, on the rise, they pushed me out of the peloton, that is, I had to go on my own, somewhere even half-horse. I was very tired for the first stage. On the first descent, my leg twitched, I parted a little, lost speed and had a panic attack. I have a fad in my head, I’m very afraid of speed. I don’t know what to do with it. For the last two days I have been riding up and down this slope, it seemed to me that I was able to overcome myself, but something went wrong, that’s all. Only on the last lap I was able to more or less pull myself together. I’m ashamed of what I did.
“But that didn’t change the fact that you did as well as you wanted on the shooting range.
– I think it even helped, because I was so ashamed of my behavior on the track that I thought that I should do everything here to somehow win back those seconds. I didn’t even have time to think, I worked faster to fight off this horror,” said Merkushina.
