At the Olympics, politics has always come before sports

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Jules Boykoff is a former professional soccer player who represented the United States on the U-23 national team, a professor at Pacific University and an international expert in sports politics. His most recent books are What Are the Olympics For? and the forthcoming memoir, Kicking.

Olympic legends are made through athletic performances that awe and inspire. But at the Milan Cortina Winter Games, Vladyslav Heraskevych became a legend for his commitment to principle, for sacrificing his opportunity to compete despite being a medal contender.

The Ukrainian skeleton athlete will always be an indelible memory from a Winter Games that demonstrated to the world that the International Olympic Committee, the self-proclaimed “supreme authority” of the Olympics, is supremely out of touch. The IOC’s dogmatic, fanciful brand of “neutrality” deprived an Olympian of his rightful opportunity to go for gold. The reality is that the IOC’s neutrality stance favours those in power and has ramifications far beyond these Winter Games.

The IOC disqualified Mr. Heraskevych over his “helmet of remembrance” featuring images of 24 Ukrainian athletes killed by Russia since its invasion in 2022. “Some of them were my friends,” he revealed.

The IOC allowed the athlete to wear the helmet during training runs – where he logged one of the fastest times – but then swerved course, citing a rule in the Olympic Charter that states, “No kind of demonstration of political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas.” Mr. Heraskevych lodged an appeal with the Court of Arbitration for Sport, but was denied.

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The truth is that the Olympics are political through and through. Claiming otherwise is an Olympic tradition of sorts, and one that’s rooted in illusion. From the modern Games’ inception in the 1890s, when French aristocrat Baron Pierre de Coubertin launched the event in Athens, the IOC has professed that the Olympics transcend politics. But to create the Games in the first place, the Baron collected a gaggle of power brokers – mostly European aristocrats – who used their political muscle to leverage support for the project.

The IOC staged the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin knowing full well that Adolf Hitler and the Nazis were weaponizing the Games and instituting an “Aryans-only” policy within German sports organizations. The IOC permitted an all-white apartheid team from South Africa to participate until it grudgingly banned the country in the 1960s in response to global political pressure.

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As we saw at Milan Cortina, the very structure of the opening ceremony foregrounds political nationalism, with Olympians marching in by country when doing so by sport would more fittingly embrace the spirit of international goodwill. Sometimes this structure inflames animosity: athletes from Israel were booed as they entered the Olympic stadium in Milan. Meanwhile, the two Olympians from Greenland – biathletes Ukaleq Slettemark and Sondre Slettemark – have no choice but to compete for Denmark, since Greenland, as an autonomous territory, lacks a National Olympic Committee. On the field of competition, Greenland’s flag is considered contraband. The colonizer’s is not. All of this fizzes with the political.

The IOC is the primary purveyor of the flimsy fiction that the Olympics are not political. Freshly minted IOC president Kirsty Coventry has clung to that script at the Milan Cortina Games, committing to “keeping sport a neutral ground – a place where every athlete can compete freely, without being held back by the politics or divisions of their governments,” a statement that Olympic mavens interpreted as kicking the door ajar for the possible return of Russia to the five-ring fold.

In a moment marked by a paucity of bravery, Vladyslav Heraskevych stood up on sport’s biggest stage and showed courage. He sacrificed his Olympic dream on the altar of his convictions. He punctured the fairy tale that the Olympics are not political. And he exposed the IOC’s selective morality.

After all, the IOC permitted Mr. Heraskevych to wear his “helmet of remembrance” during his training runs. Then – poof! – the IOC changed direction and said he could not wear the helmet but could instead don a black armband. And yet, at the 2014 Sochi Olympics the IOC forbade Ukrainian athletes from wearing black armbands. So, a rule is a rule. Until it’s not.

At the 2022 Beijing Winter Games, Mr. Heraskevych unfurled a sign that read “No War In Ukraine” after completing a run during Olympic competition. In that instance the IOC decided there would be no repercussions for the athlete since they interpreted his action as “a general call for peace.”

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Four years later, when Mr. Heraskevych sidestepped direct reference to Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, and simply commemorated his compatriots who were killed during the war, the IOC dropped the hammer. Meanwhile, when members of the Ukrainian luge relay team expressed solidarity with Mr. Heraskevych by kneeling and raising their helmets skyward, they were not penalized.

To call the IOC’s response to outbursts of athlete activism inconsistent is to make a colossal understatement. When Algerian athletes released roses into the Seine River during the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympics to honour the more than 100 people who were shot and drowned there by French police in 1961, mum was the word. But when Manizha Talash, the Afghan breakdancer representing the Refugee Olympic Team, unveiled a cape emblazoned with the words “Free Afghan Women,” she was disqualified.

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When Haitian athletes arrived in Italy wearing uniforms featuring Toussaint L’Ouverture, the iconic leader who overturned slavery and founded the world’s first Black republic in 1804, the IOC deemed it a violation of a rule banning political symbolism, forcing the Haitians to paint over his image. Meanwhile, at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, when two Chinese cyclists wore pins bearing Mao Zedong’s image they walked off with a mild warning from the IOC.

The list of contradictions goes on and on. The point is that the IOC appears to be concocting decisions almost at random, proffering solutions in search of problems, rather than operating from a steady moral compass. This is the definition of capriciousness, and caprice is a vital arrow in the autocrat’s quiver. At a time of rising authoritarianism around the globe, this is especially vexing. The Olympics should be a bulwark against repression, not a vector for it.

All of this arrives against a politicized backdrop, with the IOC seriously considering allowing Russia back into the Olympic fold. In December, the IOC’s Executive Board recommended that youth athletes from Russia be able to participate in international competitions under their own flag and national anthem in both individual and team sports.

IOC advises sports bodies to let Russians compete in youth events again with flag and anthem

Then, at pre-Games IOC meetings in Milan, Johan Eliasch, an IOC member and president of the International Ski Federation, requested clearer guidelines for Russia’s exclusion in order to make sure that the country wasn’t being unduly singled out. “We can’t be a political organization,” he stated.

Russia has been in the Olympic wilderness since it was nabbed in a doping scandal at the 2014 Sochi Games that rocked the sporting world. More recently, the IOC banned the Russian Olympic Committee from the Paris Games, but allowed around a dozen vetted Russian athletes to participate as neutrals without the Russian flag or anthem. The IOC rooted its stance in two factors. First, Russia decimated the Olympic Truce, a non-binding United Nations resolution encouraging countries to avoid war during the Games that Russia violated immediately after the 2022 Winter Olympics concluded. Second, Russia abrogated the Olympic Charter when it violated the territorial integrity of the National Olympic Committee of Ukraine by absorbing “regional sports organizations which are under the authority of the National Olympic Committee of Ukraine.” Numerous countries – including the United States and Israel – have violated the Olympic Truce over and over and not faced penalty.

Talk of Russia’s potential reintegration into the Olympics is galling to many. “Sport shouldn’t mean amnesia,” noted Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, “and the Olympic movement should help stop wars, not play into the hands of aggressors.” In refusing to choose sides, all too often the IOC sides with oppressive forces.

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When tyrants see wishy-washy pusillanimity masquerading as neutrality, they lick their lips. The IOC’s actions in Italy puts the group in a weaker position for dealing with the overseer of the Los Angeles 2028 Summer Olympics: a fuzzy-brained orange-tinged, norm-shredding megalomaniac who knows how to use sports to his political advantage. Under Donald Trump, the United States has come off its hinges. Many political scientists no longer believe the U.S. qualifies as a democracy. This spells trouble for the Olympics.

History will vindicate Vladyslav Heraskevych. In a whipsaw world of gaudy grifters and bilious bullies, he offered an inspiring reminder that integrity still matters, that the message is more important than the medal, that the path to justice is windy but righteous.