Browsing through Instagram last night I came across a long post from the Polish tennis player Magda Linette. She began by talking about the people who ask her if she doesn’t get homesick, traveling to tournaments around the world. Her answer to them is that this is the life she’s chosen for herself. She added that when she’s back in Poland, she sees Ukrainians (over a million refugees are now in her country) and she wonders about them: Have they found a new life in Poland? How much do they miss their country? And she realizes, in a way she hasn’t always, how lucky she is, how lucky so many of us are.
The war, she writes, is not being covered by the media the way it once was, yet horrible things are happening all the time. She closes with a passionate declaration of support for the Ukrainian people and the hope that someday they will find peace and happiness in their homeland.
It was one of the most beautiful things I have ever read or heard from an athlete.
