Donation equal to prize Ukraine pays gold medallists
Heraskevych barred for wearing ‘helmet of memory’
The owner of Ukrainian football club Shakhtar Donetsk has donated more than $200,000 to skeleton racer Vladyslav Heraskevych. The athlete was disqualified from the Milano Cortina Winter Games before competing over the use of a helmet depicting Ukrainian athletes killed in the war with Russia, the club said on Tuesday.
The 27-year-old Heraskevych was disqualified last week when the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation jury ruled that imagery on the helmet — depicting athletes killed since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 — breached rules on athletes’ expression at the Games.
He then lost an appeal at the Court of Arbitration for Sport hours before the final two runs of his competition, having missed the first two runs due to his disqualification.
