A Ukrainian breakdancer rallied for the Olympics as her country did after Russia’s invasion.

PARIS — For ordinary mortals, it’s daunting enough to picture the feats of endurance, grit and discipline required to become an Olympic athlete. Now imagine mustering all that even as your country reels from a blood-soaked onslaught, including a Russian rocket attack on a cemetery, during the burial of your grandfather, that leaves your grandmother grievously wounded.

Little wonder that Ukrainian Kateryna Pavlenko’s training regimen for the competition in breakdancing — known as “breaking” at the Paris Olympics — basically collapsed after that.

Watching helplessly from Los Angeles, where she’d moved shortly before the full-scale Russian invasion of her country in 2022, Pavlenko felt paralyzed as she followed the cataclysmic news from home, she told me on Thursday. Her days passed in a blur, her workouts slowed to a trickle, and terrifying images of the violence half a world away consumed her.

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Back in Ukraine, her mother had fled her home in Kharkiv, near the Russian border, as Moscow’s advancing troops laid waste to her neighborhood. Pavlenko’s childhood friends were joining units at the front lines, fighting for their country’s survival.

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For Pavlenko, who competes under the name “B-girl Kate,” the life she’d created for herself as an athlete hoping to compete at the Paris Games suddenly seemed pointless, hopeless, impossible.

“I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t do anything,” she said. “My heartbeat was super-crazy. I had to take pills to calm myself down. ... I don’t even remember that year.”

And then, in late 2022, around the time Ukraine itself rallied to liberate thousands of square miles that Russian forces had occupied, Pavlenko summoned reserves of toughness — “a push up from rock bottom,” she said. She began training again, working on her moves in L.A. garages with her crew of B-girls and B-boys, and working out at the gym. The prize was to make it to Paris, where just 16 women and 16 men would qualify for the Olympics.

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And, this spring, after finally being granted a U.S. travel document that allowed her to compete in qualifying tournaments, she made it.

I spoke with Pavlenko at the Olympic Village, shortly after she arrived in Paris. She is 29 years old — focused, single-minded, centered.

Her grandmother needed 70 stitches after shrapnel........

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