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Russian forces have killed more than 650 Ukrainian athletes and coaches since the 2022 invasion. At the Milan Cortina Olympics, Ukrainian skeleton racer Vladyslav Heraskevych had a touching plan to honor some of them.
The helmet Heraskevych wore during training, and intended to wear during his event, featured photos of more than 20 Ukrainian athletes and coaches who have died in the war. But on Thursday, just before he was scheduled to compete, the International Olympic Committee disqualified Heraskevych from the Games, pointing to a rule that prohibits certain acts of self-expression.
“There are 130 conflicts going on in the world,” IOC spokesperson Mark Adams said. “We cannot have 130 different conflicts featured, however terrible they are, during the field of play, during the actual competition.” Adams said he would encourage Heraskevych to “express his grief” in other ways.
Heraskevych’s disqualification marks yet another victory handed to Russia by the IOC. It’s also the latest example of how the IOC’s uneven application of its own rules on expression gives it a great deal of leeway in deciding what is and isn’t appropriate behavior for Olympic athletes.
This week’s decision underscores the uneasy—and inconsistent—balance the Olympic Games have tried to strike between maintaining an air of apolitical harmony and recognizing the humanity of the competitors, many of whom live and train under conditions of violence or persecution. Heraskevych has described the deaths memorialized on his helmet as “the price of our dignity.”
According to the IOC, the issue with Heraskevych’s plan was not the helmet itself, but his intention to wear it during competition. The organization said it would have allowed him to wear a black armband during his skeleton run and show off his helmet after the fact. Heraskevych was uninterested in that alternative and appealed his case to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. That appeal was denied on Friday, with CAS citing the need to “provide a reasonable balance between athletes’ interests to express their views, and athletes’ interests to receive undivided attention for their sporting performance on the field of play.” Heraskevych maintains that the IOC’s standards are murky and his helmet should have been OK’ed.
There are two rules that could potentially come into play in Heraskevych’s case. Rule 50 of the Olympic charter bans any “demonstration or political, religious, or racial propaganda” in Olympic venues. Rule 40 allows “freedom of expression” for athletes, but only “in accordance with the guidelines determined by the IOC executive board.” The IOC said Heraskevych would have violated Rule 40 if he’d been allowed to compete while wearing his helmet.
In reality, the IOC often seems to be making up the rules—and how to apply them. In the Tokyo Games, held in 2021, U.S. hammer thrower Gwen Berry and shot-putter Raven Saunders both made arm gestures at their events as statements about racial injustice and oppression. Neither were reprimanded. Four years later, Manizha Talash, an Afghan breaker on the Olympic Refugee Team, was disqualified for wearing a cape that said “free Afghan women” during her pre-qualifier routine.
Perhaps the most famous crackdown on Olympic free speech came during the Mexico City Games in 1968, when Team USA track athletes John Carlos and Tommie Smith were suspended for raising their gloved fists in a Black Power salute on the medal podium. It was after two other Black U.S. track stars were banned for staging a similar protest during a medal ceremony in 1972 that the IOC expanded its restriction on political statements to explicitly include racial protests.
In a video challenging his disqualification this week, Heraskevych compared himself to German weightlifter Matthias Steiner, who was allowed to hold up a photo of his recently deceased wife as he received his gold medal at the Beijing Olympics in 2008. He has also pointed out that, just this year, Jared Firestone, a skeleton racer representing Israel, wore a kippah at the opening ceremony that featured the names of the 11 Israeli athletes and coaches killed by the Palestinian militant group Black September at the 1972 Munich Games. The official Olympic guidelines—the ones the IOC says Heraskevych violated—explicitly prohibit athlete expression during medal ceremonies and at the opening and closing ceremonies in addition to “during competition on the field of play.”
Heraskevych’s helmet would not have distracted his competitors, nor drawn the audience’s attention away from them; skeleton racers slide down the course one by one. It was a solemn acknowledgment of a fate that could have easily been his, too.
Russia is officially banned from competing at the Games—kind of. The IOC first banned the nation from competing under its flag in 2018 on account of its systematic doping program, then continued to ban it (as well as its ally, Belarus) as punishment for invading Ukraine. But Russian and Belarusian athletes are still allowed to participate as “Individual Neutral Athletes”—a meaningless euphemism that everyone knows means Russia.
The IOC’s toothless approach to Russia highlights the bizarre position the Olympics occupies in international relations. Somehow, nearly every country in the world is able to come to an agreement on thousands of specific parameters for athletic competitions and get their acts together to mount an insanely complicated international event every two years. For those two weeks, athletes are expected to forget their nations’ silly little differences, like who is currently invading whom.
The Olympics’ prohibition on political demonstrations and expression are supposed to be a gesture toward global unity, and there’s certainly value in a show of low-stakes cooperation. But it’s an insult to ask Ukrainians to act like everything is fine and normal when Russia is in the midst of destroying their country, killing athletes and coaches who might have otherwise been in Italy chasing their dreams.
Athletes from Ukraine are representing a country in the midst of a deadly invasion. Many have overcome unimaginable difficulties to make it to the Olympics this year. It makes sense that they feel a responsibility, on behalf of Ukrainians watching the Games, to recognize the ongoing suffering at home. Considering that the IOC contorted its rules and invented a new category of athletes just to allow Russians to compete at the Winter Olympics, it would have been nice to show some flexibility for those on the other side of the war.