The Heraskevych Affair and the Olympic Committee Innocence

On February 12, at 10:30 CET, Ukrainian skeleton racer Vladyslav Heraskevych had to take on the track in Cortina Sliding Centre, having reportedly a good chance of winning an Olympic medal. Shortly before the start, he was approached, in person, by the President of the International Olympic Committee, Kirsty Coventry, who informed him that he was disqualified from the competition because his helmet, as the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation (IBSF) jury has ruled out, “was not in compliance with the rules.”

The stand-off between the captain of the Ukrainian Olympic team and the IOC officials had started a few days earlier, when Heraskevych began his trainings in the Olympic village wearing the helmet that had no signs but portraits of his 22 colleagues killed by Russians within the past few years during the so-called “special military operation”. In fact, many more Ukrainian athletes perished under the Russian assault: the website Tribuna.ua lists more than 800 names, including several adolescents starting from age 9. Heraskevych’s position and ultimate goal was clear: to pay tribute to his fellow-sportsmen who would never be able to take part in any events and to remind the cheerful pubic about the genocidal war waged by Russia not so far from the serene valleys of Cortina d’Ampezzo.

Victory in defeat

While the first message was quite acceptable, and the IOC officials even suggested the Ukrainian athlete wear a black ribbon instead of controversial portraits on his helmet, the second message was deemed inappropriate, allegedly falling under paragraph 50 (2) of the Olympic rules: “No kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas”.. Heraskevych thus had got early warning, so the final decision of the IOC did not come out of blue: nobody blinked first. The crash unavoidably followed, and its implication might be more serious for the IOC and other sport institutions than for the athlete.

Even though his appeal to the CAS (Court of Arbitration for Sport) was unsuccessful, Heraskevych clearly won the battle, at least in moral terms. “Today we paid the price for our dignity,” he commented bitterly on the IOC decision. “I believe that I did not break any rules. I defended the interests of Ukraine, and not so much the country as the memory of these athletes. They deserve it, but unfortunately, the IOC thinks otherwise.”

The National Olympic Committee of Ukraine declared full support for the sportsman’s brave decision: “Today, Vladislav did not start, but he was not alone — all of Ukraine was, is, and will be with him. Because when an athlete stands up for truth, honor, and memory, that is already a victory”. Many of Vladyslav’s colleagues, both Ukrainian and international, expressed their solidarity with him. Ukrainian businessmen initiated fundraising – to collect $100,000, a symbolic sum that the athlete would have received if he had won the race, if the IOC had not eliminated him from the race. The money, at Herakevych’s suggestion, will go to a special fund to support the families of fallen athletes.

Quite a few international celebrities and politicians joined their voices in support for his noble gesture. “Disqualifying Ukrainian athlete Vladyslav Heraskevych for paying tribute to victims of Russian aggression is indefensible,” Estonian Foreign Affairs Minister Margus Tsahkna wrote on X. “This is not about equipment rules, it is about suppressing the voice of a nation under attack. Remembering those killed by Russia’s war is not a violation, it is our moral duty… When remembrance is punished, neutrality becomes complicity.” “I don’t consider this a very fair decision,” Czech President Peter Pavel said. “It’s not about political propaganda that could offend someone. It’s about expressing respect.”

President Volodymyr Zelensky was probably the most outspoken: he not only praised the athlete “for his clear position” and for the reminding “the whole world of what Russian aggression is and what the price of fighting for independence is,” but he also lashed out at the IOC for their alleged betrayal of the principles of Olympism and playing into the hands of the aggressor. “It is Russia that constantly violates Olympic principles and uses the time of the Olympics for war. In 2008, it was the war against Georgia; in 2014, it was the occupation of Crimea; in 2022, it was the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. And now, in 2026, despite numerous calls for a ceasefire during the Winter Olympics, Russia shows complete disregard and increases its missile and drone strikes on our energy infrastructure and our people… But at the same time, 13 Russians are now in Italy participating in the Olympics. They are competing in the Olympic Games under “neutral” flags, but in real life they publicly support Russian aggression against Ukraine and the occupation of our territories. They are the ones who deserve to be disqualified.”

Amplifying the message

On the same day, he decreed Vladyslav Heraskevych be endowed with the Order of Freedom “for his dedicated service to the Ukrainian people, civic courage, and patriotism in defending the ideals of freedom and democratic values.” Speculations emerged about some sort of a high-level conspiracy aimed at steering a political scandal. The goal was arguably to provoke an IOC reaction and substantially amplify the conflict (and Heraskevych’s message) that otherwise would have remained largely unnoticed. The argument, however, looks dubious for several reasons. 

First, far from conspiring, Ukrainian sport officials urged athletes to “control themselves” and respond calmly to any potential provocations from the Russian side. “You need to control yourself so there are no provocations — because those provocations would then be used against you, against Ukraine, to claim that we are the ones provoking,” the president of the National Olympic Committee of Ukraine, Vadym Guttsait, instructed his team departing for Milan.

Secondly, Vladyslav Heraskevych long ago proved to be a committed fighter for the Ukrainian cause, ready to sacrifice his personal success for what he believed was truth and justice. Back in 2022, in Beijing, he raised a poster with the words ”No war in Ukraine” in front of cameras and went unpunished only because it happened two weeks before Russia’s all-out invasion, so the message did not contain (at least for the IOC officials) any apparent anti-Russian connotation. Most probably perceived the slogan at the time as an expression of the IOC’s generic pacifism rather than a protest against the ongoing Russian hybrid (“low-intensity”) war in Ukraine euphemistically downplayed at the time as “the Ukraine crisis”. 

But the main vulnerability of the “conspiracy argument” in this story is intrinsic: the “commemorative helmet” with small portraits of deceased athletes was such a minor transgression (if at all) that it would have barely had any impact on anybody it it had not been amplified by the IOC’s inadequate reaction. Why IOC officials overreacted in this situation seems to be the more interesting (and more relevant) question.

Manipulation and subterfuge

The first explanation that may come to our mind invokes Russian money and influence. The record of Moscow’s pernicious activity in international bodies is vast, starting from multiple cases of bribery and blackmail to more elaborate schemes of subterfuge and manipulation. One of them, the most reckless and scandalous, even cost Russians suspension from the 2016-2018 Olympic games, after independent investigators revealed a massive, state-sponsored doping conspiracy. It appeared that the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) actively manipulated doping probes and, with help from laboratory officials, swapped tainted urine samples for clean ones to allow Russian athletes to win medals in the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics.

The latest reports indicate that Russia pays special attention to the Global South and its representatives in international bodies, trying to capitalize on their deeply entrenched anti-Western/pro-Russian bias, their poor knowledge of European affairs, susceptibility to Moscow-baked narratives and, in some cases, to Moscow-made special offers. Some of these allies in particular are helpful for Moscow to advance its agenda. Thus Russians do not spare their efforts to bring in more countries from the Global South to international sports federations, even though many sports, especially winter sports like ice-hockey, are virtually non-existent there.

Corruption, however, might be not the main and probably not the only explanation of the IOC’s benevolent attitude toward various rogue (but sufficiently rich) regimes – a feature discernable actually not only in IOC moves but also in twisted policies of many other organizations. Vladyslav Heraskevych briefly touched on the problem when protesting the IOC’s double standards: severe punishment for his alleged violation, on the one hand, and benign neglect of the Russian flags at the sport events or even on the helmet of Italian snowboarder Roland Fischnaller, on the other hand. Jeremy Pizzi, a legal advisor at Global Rights Compliance, agreed that the disqualification of the Ukrainian athlete is only a minor part of the much bigger issue: “The real problem is the inconsistencies between the IOC permitting Russian athletes to compete when they violated neutrality rules with pro-war actions and allowing athletes to compete with a Russian flag. This raises the question of why one form of expression to support victims of aggression is banned, but other expressions supporting brutal crimes are not”.

It seems that the pronounced positions of Vladyslav Heraskevych and his many colleagues vis-à-vis the Russian genocidal war in Ukraine stand against and potentially undermine the IOC’s and many other organizations’ efforts to turn a blind eye to the criminal nature of Putin’s regime, to normalize the evil, and come back to business as usual with a rogue state that daily slaughters Ukrainian civilians. The IOC’s rapprochement with Russia, notably, unfolds despite a lack of any retreat or remorse on the Russian side. On the contrary, Moscow persistently escalates its attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure and inhabitants, and Kremlin officials and propagandists do not hide their genocidal intent – to eradicate Ukraine as both a state and a nation. In this fascistoid state, the overwhelming majority of the population support the regime and its war, and Russian athletes are no exception: all either actively support Putin’s war effort or, at least, tacitly allow the regime to use their names, their fame and achievements in warmongering propaganda and chauvinistic mobilization.

Russians are back 

Nonetheless, the IOC loosens the screws rather than tightening them. At the end of 2023, the IOC allowed Russian athletes to return to individual competitions, provided they would participate under a neutral flag. Ukrainians adamantly condemned the “shameful decision, which undermines Olympic principles” and “essentially gives Russia the green light to weaponize the Olympics, because the Kremlin will use every Russian athlete as a weapon in its propaganda warfare.” In the official statement, the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs warned international partners that Russian athletes “often represent sports organizations associated with the armed forces. Some are on active duty in the Russian military, and some wear symbols of Russia’s armed aggression against Ukraine on their sport uniforms. [They] not only sympathize with the murders of Ukrainian women and children, but are likely to be directly involved in these terrible crimes… Moscow will not be raising neutral white flags at the competitions, as the IOC suggests, but will be demonstrating the triumph of its ability to avoid responsibility for the largest armed conflict in Europe since World War II.”

The IOC, predictably, ignored the warnings as “too emotional.” The spurious “neutrality” paved the way for Russian athletes to the Paris Summer Olympics in 2024 and, then, to Milan-2026. Even more oddly, sports officials from Russia had never been fully suspended, so their behind-the-scene influence on international sports organizations remained largely unbroken. One example is Shamil Tarpishchev, the president of the Russian Tennis Federation and a supporter of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, who still sits on the board of the IOC. His fellow-countryman, oligarch Alisher Usmanov, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, was re-elected president of the International Fencing Federation (FIE) in 2024 despite international sanctions (though he eventually resigned under public pressure).

One may wonder if the IOC would impose any sanctions on Elena Vyalbe, a former Olympic champion and currently the head of the national Ski and Snowboard Federation, who mused recently on Russia’s own sanctions against Westerners: “I think that if we had dropped a serious bomb on central London, it would all be over by now, and we would be allowed everywhere. Russia’s struggle with the outside world has been going on for centuries. They have never loved us, even when they pretended to. They are always standing behind us with a knife. I love it when our country is strong, and I guess our strength annoys the whole world”. Or perhaps we should expect her election to the IOC board instead of Usmanov but alongside Tarpishchev?

In the meantime, the IOC made one more step toward legitimizing (or downplaying) the Russian war in Ukraine through sportswashing. At the end of last year, they allowed Russian juniors to compete under their national flag, i.e. flag of the rogue state that wages a brutal genocidal war against its neighbor. A number of international federations (Chess, Volleyball, Fencing, Equestrian) jumped immediately at this potentially profitable opportunity. Two more federations (Judo and Sambo) even overplayed their hands (and IOC benevolence), allowing not only juniors but all Russian athletes to compete with their flag and anthem.

Sportswashing rogues

The standard justification for such decisions is the alleged autonomy or even independence of sport (like culture) from politics. It is not true even in democracies, where civil society is strong and state power has limits. But in autocracies, it is a complete falsehood – unforgivable wishful thinking or deliberate unscrupulous lie. Totalitarian states strive to etatize everything and mobilize for regime service. This phenomenon is well researched and documented by both scholars and journalists. They define it sarcastically “sportswashing” – cleaning the tainted image of rogue regimes by switching attention from their ugly, repressive–at-home, aggressive-abroad activities to their gentle promotion of sport events, support for sport talents, and impressive organizational skills proved in the process. Garry Kasparov, a renowned Russian dissident and former world chess champion, contends that sportswashing today is a “step up” from how dictators used to buy influence – it has become a way for them, through money, to “infiltrate societies in free countries.”

The essence and ultimate goal of sportswashing is political manipulation. According to Sarath Ganji, it can manifest in three ways: “First, sports can displace negative content by elevating alternative stories. This form of manipulation resembles a smoke screen, a haze of emergent stories capitalizing on competing news values to cloud coverage of other events… Second, sports can discredit negative content by amplifying alternate perspectives”. In this role, “global sports resemble an influencer industry teeming with PR professionals”. And thirdly, “sports can debase negative content by arousing alternate emotions,” something that Emile Durkheim defined as “collective effervescence” – a feeling familiar to anybody who attended sport matches or other mass gathering with high emotional mobilization.

Russia is generally considered alongside four other dictatorships (China, Qatar, Emirates and Saudi Arabia) as a country engaged most actively in sportswashing. But, unlike all these and other autocracies, Russia is also engaged in a brutal war of aggression. And this ‘peculiarity’ makes its sportswashing activity particularly sinister and dangerous. Sport is weaponized in today’s Russia, like all other things – culture, religion, trade, information, history, education – down to preschool. Russia officials boldly demonstrate an instrumental, crudely militaristic approach to sport. They do not play nicely along the IOC “sport beyond politics” script and do not buy a fairy tale about athletes’ alleged “neutrality”. 

Bogus neutrality

Last year’s celebrations of Alexander Ovechkin, a top hokey player in the North American professional league, who broke the NHL’s all-time goal scoring record, demonstrate graphically that no “neutral” (or even “American”, in this case) status can spare Russian athletes from brazen appropriation of their fame and achievements by Putin’s propagandists. They clearly do not care much about Ovechkin’s (or anybody else’s) alleged “neutrality” but do care about Russian imperial glory, victory and dominance.

“Despite the sanctions, despite the discrimination, despite everything, Russians are winning. No one will stop us,” declared one of them. “In an era when world sports have become an arena for political confrontation, a great Russian hockey player once again proved that a true champion will break through any barriers,” boasted another. “Ovechkin has never hidden or been embarrassed by his passport, remains a member of the Putin team, and, at the same time, one of the main faces of world hockey, a favorite of millions, and the best scorer in the NHL”.

Indeed, Ovechkin has never criticized Putin’s “team” nor ever voiced up against the political (mis)use of his fame – as did, for example, in 2022, Elizaveta Tuktamysheva, the figure skating world champion. One may opine that Ovechkin did not praise Putin either, and made even a generic call for “no more war” at the outbreak of the full-scale invasion, so technically he could be considered “neutral”. The case, however, exemplifies how tricky the notion of “neutrality” is, and how easily it can be ignored by malevolent interpreters, – unless, of course, the athletes themselves make a clear statement on the issue.

So far, “neutrality” seems to be a fig leaf that allows the IOC and numerous sport federations to greenlight very dubious personages from Russia, like a rhythmic gymnast and ardent Putin’s propagandist Lala Kramarenko, figure skater Petr Gumennik who infamously performed a military-themed routine in an ice show in 2024, wearing a Russian soldier’s uniform, and another figure skater, Adelia Petrosyan, who collected aid for Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine at the Summer in Moscow festival last year, or several Russian and Belarusian trampoline jumpers, implicated in pro-war propagandistic actions. The fact that quite a few Russian athletes are members of the Russian military or members of military sportsclubs does not preclude their participation in international events under the “neutral” flag. According to Ukrainian journalists, 45 out of the 71 medals Russia received at the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics were won by athletes who are members of the Central Sports Club of the Russian Army; two years later, at the Winter Olympics in Beijing, they won 14 out of 32 medals under an ostensibly “neutral” flag.

Uphill battle

The general tendency looks rather clear: both the IOC and most international sports federations would like to ease and ultimately lift sanctions from Russian athletes, from Russian officials and, of course, from Russian money. It does not matter for them that Russia has not changed its behavior but, instead, escalated the daily terror and bloodshed in Ukraine. IOC officials, however, maintain the same mantra: “Individual athletes cannot be punished for the acts of their governments”. 

But how “punished”? Murdered, like 600-plus Ukrainian fellows? Exiled from the ruined country and occupied territories, like millions of other Ukrainians? Dispossessed of their sports halls, stadiums, swimming pools, and even the possibility to hold regular training sessions without bombings and air alarms? No, they are merely asked not to support, directly or indirectly, the genocidal war that their government wages in Ukraine. They are called on merely not to sportswash their rulers and their policies, not to enhance their symbolical power, and contribute with personal fame to their criminal cause. As long as Russian athletes do not support their government’s genocidal war in Ukraine, they are not responsible. But in any case, as Russian citizens they are accountable for everything their country does. All of them have a choice, all of them can find a way to distance themselves from the criminal deeds of their government.

Vladyslav Heraskevych ran not just against the IOC’s debatable rules but against the general tendency that transpires increasingly in the IOC’s questionable decisions, in the persistent avoidance of accurate wording (the Russian war in Ukraine is usually called a “conflict” – just a minor family quarrel), and persistent attempts to downplay both the scale and uniqueness of that “conflict”: “This is one among 28 wars and conflicts going on this world and all the other athletes are competing peacefully with each other,” one IOC official admonished Ukrainians. “There are 135 conflicts on our planet where military actions are waged. So, the IOC cannot make any exceptional decisions under these circumstances,” another added.

Ukraine faces an uphill battle – with the external enemy and domestic problems, but also with the rigidity and corruptness of international institutions, the ignorance, selfishness and cynicism of international leaders, and the growing “Ukraine fatigue” within populations at large who increasingly see Ukraine as a nuisance that prevents others from enjoying life to the full. But there are also committed fighters who are not giving up, who resist and retort, and give us a bit of hope.

A shorter version of this article was published in Raam.