SAINT-DENIS, France — A voice has resonated through these early Olympic days even though it comes from a speaker so unwrinkled and doe-eyed he might make an observer think of Bambi. When it coursed through a conference hall from a microphone Friday and near a pretty indoor pool from up close Monday, it brought brutal words through unassuming and understated means. If a distant invasion can remain an abstraction no matter how evil, maybe a listener can need a voice to feel a hint of the full horrible.

Somehow, when the Ukrainian National Olympic Committee brought five athletes and one president to the main press center Friday, it was the wisp of a guy on the right end of the dais, born on Christmas Day 2005, who ushered the mind all the way to the reality and the heart all the way to the woodshed. For a long while of the hour, he barely spoke.

It was unclear whether this diver, Oleksii Sereda, would speak at all. He sat quietly while words rang from older compatriots such as tennis star Elina Svitolina, that exemplary spokeswoman for the 36 million Ukrainians, or Olga Kharlan, the fencer disqualified from the 2023 world championships because she refused to shake the hand of the Russian opponent she had defeated.

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There Sereda sat, while committee president Vadym Guttsait made statements such as, “For us, there is no peace festival,” and, “I will never wish anyone to feel how does it feel like to be in Ukraine right now,” and, “For us, the Russian athletes [15 competing as neutral after their country’s banishment] do not exist. We don’t greet them. We don’t say hello. We don’t even look at them.”

Finally, minutes from the end, Sereda got a question and used a voice not even close to blaring to tell of a blaring kind of human stress.

“So for me it’s the second Olympic Games,” the 18-year-old said. “I was thinking that the first one [when he was 15] was going to be harder, but as I see now, the second is going to be much harder.”

He arrived as no one’s arriviste. He had become the youngest 10-meter European champion in 2019 at 13 years 7 months, besting that famed old megastar Tom Daley from Plymouth, England, who had been 13 years 10 months (and nowadays 30). Sereda finished sixth in both individual and synchronized disciplines at the Tokyo Olympics.

But here came the first Olympics since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the first since Sereda’s sleep began suffering not only for air sirens, bombs and blinking electricity but also for relentless worry over his 53-year-old father, Viktor, called to the military efforts to save a country around their hometown of Mykolaiv, the Black Sea city of 29 months of horror and exodus where lately the bombs reached hospitals and playgrounds.

Atop the merciless precision of an unforgiving sport, tack that.

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“It’s always stressful,” Sereda told the room, “because for example, I want to call him and he [can’t] take the call. I can’t talk to him, because he’s always busy.”

He said, “It makes competition more stressful.”

A certain quiet seemed to fill the large room, and soon Sereda explained more about his father. He said, “Before the war, was business, made furniture.” And he said, “Right now, he’s a soldier, right now.” And so: “It all changed for him, for me, for all of us. He has to do this. No words. That’s it.”

Monday morning at the Aquatics Center near the Stade de France, this angelic-looking sort had to take all of that bulldozing going through his mind and go try to win a medal with partner Kirill Boliukh, 17. With such hopes in whatever part of his mind remained clear for them, they started off in seventh after the first of six rounds, inched to sixth after the third and inched to fifth after the fourth. All the while, Sereda and Boliukh would wait on the tall stairs before dives, bouncing and stretching, or in the hot tub afterward, recovering, while Sereda’s mind went sometimes to his father.

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“Yeah, of course, yeah,” he said later. “I’m always nervous about him because I don’t know what can happen there, because Mykolaiv, it’s a closed military zone, and so always rockets are flying there, bombs and stuff like that. So for me, it’s like a casual, basic sense that I’m nervous about my father, about my family.”

While the boisterous cheers in the building went for fourth-place Mexico (Kevin Berlin Reyes and Randal Willars Valdez), bronze medalist Canada (Rylan Wiens and Nathan Zsombor-Murray), silver medalist Britain (Daley and Noah Williams) and unbeatable gold medalist China (Junjie Lian and Hao Yang), Ukraine reached the fifth round, with the high degree of difficulty of 4½ forward somersaults, and that’s where Sereda would lament he erred as Ukraine ended in fifth, a mere six points behind Mexico and just fewer than 10 behind Canada and bronze.

With the voice somewhere between calm and bummed, he lamented as he and Boliukh stopped at the mixed zone, the traditional Olympic area where athletes meet reporters. As about eight Ukrainian journalists asked about five minutes of questions in Ukrainian, none concerned the invasion. People who know it in their bones don’t require insight on how it feels.

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Now and then, they laughed.

“Has Kirill chastised you?” went one question, in Ukrainian and jest.

“Kirill chastises me,” Sereda said. “And he hits me in my hotel room.”

“Only every other day,” Boliukh offered.

Otherwise, the scrum brought traditional Olympic strains. It had the time-honored question about the judging, to which Sereda said: “I don’t feel like they lowballed me. It’s my own fault,” and soon explained: “If I’d done the jump correctly for 17 points, then we would’ve been in third place. So, yeah, no, I mean, yeah, we would’ve been. But you see, that’s the sport. You make one mistake, and you’re kicked out” of contention.

Only in the subsequent English portion of the session did the awful come up.

“For me, it was hard just to prepare,” said Sereda, based in Kyiv, the capital and largest city, about 250 miles from Mykolaiv. “We had a lot of troubles during our preparation for this competition. We had no light. We always needed to go somewhere in the same place, hide. Even at night during our sleeping when we had to recover and relax, we hear alarm, and go to the safe place.”

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His sleep breaks even in Paris, he said, “because of the worry.”

And with soldiers often following Ukrainian athletes in search of inspiration and even greater pride, Sereda said: “When you’re standing on the 10 meters, you’re, like, responsible for yourself. You’re responsible for your partner, your country, people who help us, people who defend our country. So we’re thinking we just had to get a medal, but we didn’t make it, so” — pause — “yeah, this is sad for us.”

The voice stayed even-keeled, even when asked to address fellow citizens: “Guys, keep going. Never give up. Everything will be fine.”

Soon Sereda and Boliukh, neither on the list for the 10-meter individual, headed down the hall and through the doors, a voice of the 2024 Olympics leaving the Olympics while striving to come back for “the next one” and then “the next one afterward.”

Anastacia Galouchka in Kyiv contributed to this report.

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