Eleven kilometres of breaststroke: the story of a serviceman who took up swimming after a serious injury – photos

Yurii Brel, a service member from Lviv Oblast, continued his military service after suffering a serious injury in Popasna, Luhansk Oblast, and found a new passion – swimming. He now competes in national and international competitions.

Source: Zhabkolapky, a Lviv-based club for veterans and civilians

Details: Yurii, a native of the city of Sheptytskyi in Lviv Oblast, sustained a serious injury in April 2022 while carrying out a combat mission. He then faced a long period of treatment and rehabilitation. However, he decided to return to military service, while sport helped him recover – including adaptive volleyball, rowing on ergometers and swimming.

Yurii has achieved particular success in swimming – he even represents Ukraine at international competitions.

In 2024, he won medals at the annual United States Air Force and Marine Corps Trials, a sporting competition for wounded service members and veterans. In Las Vegas, Yurii competed in short-distance events – the 50-metre breaststroke and backstroke.

Yurii also became a silver medallist at a Lviv Oblast winter swimming championship for veterans.

That winter, Yurii took part in the Crazy Challenge in Kyiv, where six members of Zhabkolapky took turns to complete a continuous 24-hour swim.

"In total, the team covered 62 kilometres. For each of them, this was their first experience of a 24-hour swim. Over the course of that day, Yura spent four hours and 40 minutes in the water and swam 11 kilometres of breaststroke," the club said.

This summer, Yurii swam five kilometres at the Oceanman Kyiv'26 international open-water competition. Now he is preparing for his next 24-hour challenge, this time in open water.

"At first, sport was part of my recovery after the injury. Now I don't think of it just as rehabilitation anymore. I train, I go to competitions, I set myself new goals. One race ends, and I already want to know what's next. I'd like to swim for 12 hours continuously, but that's a goal I'm setting for next year," Yurii shared.

At Zhabkolapky, they say the club brings together service members and civilians, people with no experience and those tackling their first distances. The organisers say their goal was to create a community that would unite veterans, active soldiers and civilians.

"For me, this is a fundamental part of what we do. After coming back from the military, a former serviceman finds himself back in a civilian environment, but the experience he returns with is markedly different from that of most people around him. At the same time, civilians often don't know how to talk to veterans, they're afraid of saying the wrong thing, or they simply don't have experience of that kind of interaction.

Sport creates a space where this interaction happens naturally. You don't need to sit down at a table specifically to talk about how different we are. We have training, a coach, today's task and the next race we're all preparing for together. We help each other, we compete, we joke, we argue, and we work towards the result together," says club founder Yuliia Rudiuk.

Background: Last year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed a law on adaptive sport, which recognises this activity as a separate area of physical activity.

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