The South African, the professional pole-dancer and how cricket is offering hope in war-torn Ukraine

Kyiv – In a city where winter temperatures plunge to -20 °C and missile alerts punctuate the school day, the thud of a tennis ball on a plastic bat has become an unlikely anthem of resilience. Kobus Olivier, a 50-something South African who once plotted a wine-import venture he could not taste, now spends his mornings coaxing 12-year-old girls into front-foot drives in a freezing gym. Beside him stands Olena Kravchenko, a former British pole-dancing champion whose glittering competition days in Newcastle ended the moment her family’s video calls showed tear-stained faces in a bomb-scarred village. Together they are building Ukraine’s first cricket academy, one borrowed mat and borrowed hour at a time.

Olivier’s journey to Kyiv began with a weather app. Sweltering in Dubai, he searched for Europe’s coldest city, landed in -10 °C Kyiv, and “felt an energy I’ve never felt anywhere else”. Seven holidays later he quit a globe-trotting résumé that included directing cricket at the University of Cape Town, steering Kenya’s national set-up and running an academy with India’s Ravichandran Ashwin. Wine flopped—“I’d never tasted alcohol, so describing a merlot was tricky”—but an English-teaching gig handed him a plastic bat. A Jonty Rhodes highlight reel turned into 2,000 children across multiple schools, until Russia’s full-scale invasion sent him to Zagreb where he still ran refugee sessions three times a week.

When he returned to Kyiv two years ago, a queue in a coffee shop rewrote the script. Kravchenko, 35, fresh from a World Championship bronze in Switzerland and desperate to help her homeland, translated Olivier’s tea order. The chat overran; friendship ignited. “She’s the only English-speaker I could find,” Olivier laughs. Kravchenko, who grew up sport-less in eastern Ukraine, saw cricket’s unfamiliar shapes through a dancer’s eyes: balance, core strength, repetition. Within months she was copying throw-downs, then completing the ICC Foundation Certificate—the first Ukrainian ever accredited by the world body. She now juggles a physical-education degree and an ESL teaching course while co-running sessions.

Their ProCoach Cricket Academy, launched this month, operates out of public-school halls where classes halt for shelter drills. Heating is sporadic; nets are non-existent. Yet 200 girls and boys queue for overs, the gender split skewed sharply female. “Men get called to the front; universities are 15-to-1 girls,” Olivier notes. He rates the raw talent of Kyiv’s teenage girls above any boys he has seen in 30 years of club cricket across South Africa, Derbyshire, Sussex and Scotland. “Show them once and they replicate it. If we had facilities, Ukraine would produce world champions.”

The pair’s wider mission is psychological triage. “When the sirens sound my dogs tremble; imagine the children,” Olivier says. Kravchenko is blunter: “We cannot stop living. We fight by letting them fight over whose turn it is to bat.” Last year they shepherded a pioneer squad to Rugby School in England, funded by Olivier’s bulging contacts book—auctions of signed shirts, bats and boots supplied by friends within the global game. More tours are planned for 2024, even if only two visas clear. “Every child we get out is a victory,” Kravchenko insists.

Olivier, now naturalised in spirit—“I’m Ukrainian, settled with four dogs”—refuses exit strategies. “An old-fashioned Afrikaner keeps his word,” he shrugs. Kravchenko, whose championship poles sit in a Newcastle storage unit, counters: “I could have stayed comfortable, but family is here and cricket is my new stage.” Spring, they agree, is their next opponent. Until then, sessions will continue in whatever space a rolled mat, a tennis ball and irrepressible optimism can fit.

In a capital where darkness and cold book-end each day, the South African and the pole-dancer have turned a colonial curiosity into a lifeline, proof that even in the depths of a brutal war, the simple act of playing forward defence can feel like an act of defiance.