It is the image that will forever define the 2026 Winter Olympics: a Ukrainian skeleton racer, stoic and unbowed, holding a helmet bearing the faces of 24 athletes killed by Russia. Behind him, the icy track serves as a reminder of the dreams he sacrificed for a greater purpose.
It was an extraordinary act of bravery and defiance, which carried the tremors of Tommie Smith and John Carlos’s civil rights protest in 1968. But in his first in-depth interview since being disqualified from the Milano Cortina Games, Vladyslav Heraskevych makes one thing clear: he has unfinished business with the Olympics.
