The kid can barely see. That’s the first thing you need to know. Twenty-five years old, Ukrainian, born into a country that’s been at war longer than most Silicon Valley startups have been alive, and he can’t see well enough to ski alone. He needs a guide — a real one, flesh and blood, a guy named Vitaliy who skis ahead of him through the Italian mountains and tells him where to turn.
But for everything else — the training plan, the tactics, the motivation, the conversations at odd hours when you’re scared you’re not good enough — he talks to a machine.
Maksym Murashkovskyi won silver at the Milan-Cortina Paralympics last week. Biathlon, vision-impaired category. Skiing and shooting. The shooting is done with electronic rifles and acoustic signals — beeps that get louder or softer depending on how close you are to the target. You listen for the sweet spot, and you squeeze.
He told the reporters afterward that for six months, he’d been training with ChatGPT. “I used it as a psychologist, coach and, sometimes, as a doctor.”
Let that sit for a second.
Here’s a kid whose country has been shelled to pieces. A kid who can barely see the track in front of him. Competing at the highest level of Paralympic sport, where the margins are seconds and the pressure is the kind that breaks people who can see just fine. And when he needed someone to talk to — about fear, about tactics, about whether his knee was swelling the wrong way — he typed into a chatbot.
Not because he read a LinkedIn post about “AI-powered coaching solutions.” Because he needed help and the help was there, patient and inexhaustible, at three in the morning when nobody else was awake.
There’s a particular loneliness to being an athlete from a country at war. Your federation doesn’t have the budget for a sports psychologist. Your coach is good but stretched thin across a dozen athletes, each with their own demons. Your family is worried about things more immediate than your split times. You carry the flag of a nation that is, at this very moment, burying its sons, and you are supposed to focus on your stance width and your breathing rhythm and the exact angle of your trigger finger.
So you open a laptop and type: I’m struggling with anxiety before races. What techniques can help?
And the machine answers. It always answers. It doesn’t sigh. It doesn’t glance at the clock. It doesn’t have somewhere better to be.
The ancient Greeks had the Oracle at Delphi. You’d walk for days to get there, climb the mountain, wait your turn, and some priestess breathing volcanic fumes would tell you something cryptic that might save your life or ruin it. People went because they needed to be heard by something larger than themselves. Something that wasn’t their friend, their mother, their commander. Something outside the mess.
We’ve got a chatbot now. No mountain. No fumes. Just a blinking cursor and a server farm running on Iowa groundwater. But the need is the same — the human standing at the edge of something enormous, needing a voice to say: keep going.
“Not completely for five to ten years,” Murashkovskyi said, when asked if AI could replace coaches and psychologists. “But part of it, definitely.”
Part of it. That’s such an honest answer it almost hurts. Not the whole thing. Not the revolution the tech press wants to sell you. Just the part that’s missing. The gap between what a person needs and what the world provides.
For a lot of people, the machine isn’t replacing a human relationship. It’s occupying the chair where no human ever sat down.
Vitaliy Trush skis ahead of him on the course. Tells him where to turn. That’s the guide with a heartbeat. But the machine guided him to the course in the first place. Sat with him through six months of doubt and ice and the particular darkness of not seeing the world clearly — both literally and in the way that young men from broken countries sometimes can’t see past tomorrow.
He won silver. Two minutes behind the gold. Ten seconds ahead of bronze. Margins thin enough that one bad night’s sleep, one unanswered question, one moment of panic on the range could have erased the whole thing.
I don’t know if the chatbot understood what it was doing. I’m certain it didn’t. It doesn’t know what silver feels like against your chest. It doesn’t know what it means to hear your anthem when your country is burning six thousand kilometers east. It processed tokens and generated responses. That’s all it did.
But the kid could barely see, and the machine didn’t need him to. Didn’t pity him, didn’t patronize him, didn’t get that tight look people get when they’re talking to someone whose eyes don’t quite track right. It just answered his questions. Every one. At any hour.
He skied through the Italian mountains with a human ahead of him and an algorithm behind him, and somewhere between the two, he found enough to win.
A kid who couldn’t see found something that could see everything and asked it to help him through the dark. And it did. Without knowing what darkness is.
Source: Paralympian credits ChatGPT for helping him win silver medal