Mariia Hnes has been doing karate for almost as long as she can remember. She started at six. Eleven years on, still a teenager, she is already a world champion, a tireless presence on social media and one of the most watched young names in the sport. In an exclusive interview with The Karate Dojo, she answered our questions between training sessions, in her own words.
The making of a champion
“I started karate when I was six, so now I’ve done karate for eleven years,” she says. The turning point came in 2020, when she joined Sport Club Leader, the club she still trains with today. “I think my professional career started when I came to Sport Club Leader in 2020.”
It is the kind of decision that only looks obvious in hindsight. Within a few years it would carry her to the top of the podium.
The win of a lifetime
The defining moment came in December 2024, in the final of the World Cadet Championships in Venice. Across the tatami stood Poland’s Wiktoria Kraczaj. There was, she admits, no elaborate game plan. “My coach just told me to go onto the tatami, do my work, and enjoy the process.” She did exactly that, won 4-1, and at sixteen was a world champion in Kumite -54 kg, the title she had spent her childhood chasing.
After the final it was an unbelievable feeling. It was the win I’d been training my whole life for.
Becoming a world champion, she says, had been the dream from the very beginning. Getting there did nothing to shrink her ambitions. If anything, it sharpened them.
Fighting under the flag
For a Ukrainian athlete competing through a full-scale war, the flag is never just a detail on the back of a gi. Hnes does not pretend otherwise.
I’m really proud to represent my country under my flag.
Every time she steps onto the tatami, she says, she wants the people watching to understand exactly what it means to be there for Ukraine. It is a stance she holds without hesitation, and it gives her fights a weight that travels far beyond the scoreboard.
That pride comes with a clear line. Hnes does not shake hands with, or share a podium with, athletes competing for Russia or Belarus. In Venice in 2024 she stepped away rather than pose for a podium photograph beside a Russian competitor, a quiet, deliberate gesture that travelled far beyond the sport.
Inside the week, and a kick of her own
So what does a hard training week actually look like? “It’s one of the camp weeks,” she explains. “The first two days you have three trainings. The third day, two trainings. Then a chill day, and the same circle over and over: three, three, two.”
Every fighter has a signature, and Hnes has claimed hers: the ura-mawashi, the spinning hook kick.
I think I can call it the Hnes Maria ura-mawashi. I can do it everywhere.
Karate, the camera, and growing the sport
Hnes belongs to a generation building an audience while they build a career. She films constantly, sometimes five times a week, and she is honest that it is hard work. But she has a reason for it: she wants people to see what the sport really is.
Karate is not just dancing and screaming. It’s something really interesting.
Her hope is that the wider world is watching too.
The road ahead
Ask her where she will be in a year and the answer is immediate: on the World Championship podium. Which category? That, she says, stays a secret. Look five years out and the targets only grow: a two-time world champion, a multiple-time European champion. Above all of it sits one goal.
My main dream is to become an Olympic champion.
There is a catch she knows all too well. Karate has not been on the Olympic programme since its one appearance at Tokyo 2020, so for now that dream sits just out of reach. Hnes is openly hoping the sport returns, perhaps by 2032, and she talks about it as a question of when rather than if. Until that day comes, the World Championships are the biggest stage she can step onto, and she intends to make it her own.
Hard work pays off
For all the ambition, her philosophy is simple, and she credits the coach who shaped it. “Everything I needed to hear at twelve, fourteen and sixteen, I heard,” she says. “I always knew you should work. You should work harder. Hard work pays off.”
Still a teenager, with a world title already behind her and an Olympic dream in front of her, Mariia Hnes is only getting started.