She found out that the people she had met in the park were not roller skaters but a team training using skates for cross-country skiing.

[2] Training on skates during the spring and summer seasons she found that her disability did not effect her ability to succeed at skiing and she was achieving national positions by the time she was eighteen.

[3] When Kononova was nineteen she was chosen to travel from her home in Kyiv Oblast to represent her country at the paralympics in Canada.

Kononova won a gold medal for Ukraine in the standing biathlon at the Paralympic games in Vancouver in 2010.

She won the gold medal in the women's 6 km standing biathlon event at the 2021 World Para Snow Sports Championships held in Lillehammer, Norway.