What is wrong with the International Olympic Committee?

By Matthew Parish, Associate Editor

Thursday 12 February 2026

There are moments in international sport when the line between politics and humanity is drawn so tightly that it begins to strangle the very ideals it was designed to protect. The reported decision of the International Olympic Committee to disqualify Ukrainian skeleton athlete Vladyslav Heraskevych over the design of his helmet — allegedly in breach of Rule 50 of the International Olympic Committee’s Olympic Charter — risks becoming such a moment.

Heraskevych is not merely an elite winter sportsman. He is a young man whose country has endured invasion, bombardment and mass civilian death since 2014, and on a full scale since 2022. When he competes, he does so not as a detached cosmopolitan professional but as a citizen of a nation at war. The helmet he chose to wear — reportedly bearing images commemorating Ukrainian victims of Russian aggression — was interpreted by Olympic authorities as a prohibited political demonstration. In consequence, he was sanctioned.

Rule 50 of the Olympic Charter prohibits “any kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda” in Olympic venues. Its purpose is understandable. The modern Olympic Games were conceived as a neutral arena — a temporary truce amongst nations in which athletes might compete without the contamination of geopolitical grievance. The rule seeks to prevent the podium becoming a rostrum and the stadium a parliament.

Yet the wording of Rule 50 is both broad and ambiguous. What constitutes “political” expression? Is the invocation of the dead a political act? Is grief political? Is remembrance propaganda?

The IOC has historically interpreted Rule 50 with considerable rigidity. Athletes have been warned, sanctioned or silenced for gestures that, while symbolic, were not incitements to violence nor endorsements of party politics. The concern has always been the slippery slope — if one political message is permitted, then others must follow; the Games risk fragmentation into rival narratives.

But Heraskevych’s helmet, if accurately described as an expression of remembrance for victims of war, may not have been political in the partisan sense at all. To honour the dead is not to endorse a government, nor to campaign for a policy, nor to advocate a diplomatic position. It is to acknowledge loss.

There is a profound difference between saying “Vote for X” or “Down with Y” and saying “Remember those who have died”. The former is contestable in the arena of power; the latter is an ethical gesture that transcends ideology. In European culture — and particularly in Ukraine, where remembrance of historical trauma forms part of her national consciousness — memorialisation is not propaganda. It is civic ritual.

One might argue that in the context of an ongoing war, any reference to Ukrainian war dead is inherently political because it implicitly assigns blame. Yet this conflates recognition with accusation. The mere act of naming the fallen does not constitute a foreign policy statement. If a French athlete were to honour victims of a terrorist attack, would that be deemed a political intervention? If an American competitor memorialised those lost in a school shooting, would that be propaganda?

The IOC could have interpreted Rule 50 more narrowly — confining its prohibition to explicit endorsements, condemnations or campaign slogans. It might have reasoned that an athlete’s private act of remembrance falls outside the mischief the rule was intended to prevent. The Olympic Games are not meant to be morally sterile. They are meant to be peaceful.

Indeed the Olympic movement’s own history complicates the claim to absolute neutrality. From the boycotts of the Cold War to the symbolism of athletes marching under unified flags, the Games have never existed outside history. The very presence of Ukrainian athletes competing while their cities are shelled is itself a testament to the political reality of our time. To pretend otherwise risks a kind of institutional self-deception.

Moreover the principle of proportionality — familiar in European legal culture — should have guided the IOC’s response. Was disqualification necessary to protect the integrity of the Games? Or would a quiet warning have sufficed? Was the helmet genuinely disruptive to competition, or merely uncomfortable to administrators wary of precedent?

In times of war, symbolic acts acquire heightened sensitivity. Yet it is precisely in such times that institutions must demonstrate moral imagination. The Olympic ideal is not only about the absence of politics; it is about the affirmation of human dignity. To allow a Ukrainian athlete to honour his country’s dead would not have transformed the Games into a battleground of slogans. It would have acknowledged that athletes are human beings whose lives do not pause at the start line.

There is also the question of equality. Russian athletes have in recent years been permitted to compete under neutral banners despite their state’s actions — an accommodation justified by reference to individual innocence. If individuals are not to be held responsible for the deeds of their governments, then equally they should not be forbidden from expressing grief over the consequences of those deeds.

The IOC’s decision, if it stands as reported, risks appearing less as a defence of neutrality and more as an enforcement of silence. Silence, however, is not neutrality. It is a choice — often one that favours the status quo. When a country is invaded and thousands are killed, insisting that its athletes suppress all visible signs of mourning may inadvertently convey that suffering itself is an unwelcome intrusion into the pageantry of sport.

Ukraine competes not as an abstraction but as a nation whose sons and daughters die each week on the front line. Heraskevych’s helmet was, in all likelihood, an attempt to carry that reality with him onto the ice — not as a protest, but as remembrance. The IOC could have recognised the distinction.

Institutions endure by applying rules wisely, not mechanically. Rule 50 was designed to prevent the Olympic stage from becoming a theatre of ideological confrontation. It was not drafted to forbid an athlete from honouring the dead of his homeland. To conflate remembrance with propaganda is to stretch the rule beyond its moral purpose.

The Olympic Games aspire to celebrate human excellence under conditions of peace. But peace cannot be purchased at the price of empathy. If the Games are to remain relevant in a fractured world, they must find space for the quiet dignity of grief.

To disqualify a Ukrainian athlete for carrying the memory of his country’s fallen onto the ice may preserve a formalistic neutrality — yet it risks eroding the deeper human values the Olympic movement claims to defend.