Jenya Kazbekova

Ievgeniia 'Serikivna Kazbekova' is a Ukrainian competition climber. She is a two-time European Championships silver medallist and competed in the women's combined event at the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris.

Family and early life

Kazbekova was born in 1996 in Dnipro. Her grandparents were climbers; her grandmother won the championship of the Soviet Union in a competition in Crimea, the same place where her parents, and, met and later owned a hotel. Perlova herself was a competition climber, the Ukrainian champion, and the 2002 overall bouldering world cup winner. Her father won a silver medal in speed climbing at the 1993 UIAA Climbing World Championships in Innsbruck, Austria. Her parents regularly brought Kazbekova to competitions with them, and Perlova recalls Kazbekova already scrambling on the rocks of Crimea at the age of seven months, on family climbing trips there.
In early 2022, due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine escalating the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War, Kazbekova, her parents, and younger sister Rafael Kazbekova fled Kyiv for Germany. She has continued to be a prominent and staunch advocate for Ukrainian interests in the climbing world. In part in response to her efforts, in 2022, the International Federation of Sport Climbing cancelled several events scheduled to be held in Russia, and suspended all Russian athletes from their competitions. Kazbekova's family later moved to Manchester, England., Kazbekova is primarily based in Salt Lake City in the US, where the US climbing team trains.

, Kazbekova's highest-level international competition climbing result is 2nd place in bouldering and lead at the 2024 IFSC Climbing European Championships. She is a twelve time Ukrainian National Champion in Sport Climbing and Bouldering from 2012 to 2024. Outdoors, she redpointed her first graded sport climbing route at age eight, and her first graded route at age 11. At age 13, she climbed 8b+ "Parallel’niy mir" in Crimea. She has climbed the graded bouldering problem called Partage in Fontainebleau in France, the sport climbing route Pati Naso in Siurana in Spain, and the graded sport route Güllich at the Redstone crag in Crimea in 2017.
Kazbekova was one of the contenders for a place in sport climbing at the 2020 Summer Olympics, but fell short after a knee injury and illness prevented her from showing her best. Through competing in the 2024 Olympic Qualifier Series in Shanghai and Budapest, Kazbekova came in 6th place out of the top 48 women competing in the series to gain a spot at the sport climbing at the 2024 Summer Olympics. At the Olympics, she placed 14th in both the bouldering and lead semifinals of the combined event. Kazbekova won the silver medal in the lead and the combined event at the 2024 European Championships in Villars.