The luge team representing Ukraine took a collective knee, raising their helmets over their heads after the relay event in solidarity with disqualified teammate Vladyslav Heraskevych.

The skeleton event at the Winter Olympics has suffered a helmet controversy, with a Ukrainian athlete disqualified for paying homage to compatriots who have died in the war with Russia

Vladyslav Heraskevych, a skeleton athlete for Team Ukraine, was disqualified after refusing to change helmets at the Milan Cortina Games.

The team relay will be the final luge event of the Milan Cortina Olympics and will take place Thursday in Italy.

Olympic officials have long sought to limit political demonstrations and displays at the Games. IOC restrictions on such protests date back more than seven decades, to the 1955 Olympic Charter, though their parameters—and athletes’ response to them—have changed with the intervening years.

Ukrainian figure skater Kyrylo Marsak was exhausted last summer as he trained for the upcoming Milan Cortina Olympics. Drained, anxious and often unable to sleep, the 21-year-old could not stop thinking about his family back in Ukraine: His father is in the army on the front lines and his mother is in Kyiv,

Russia being barred from team sports at the Olympics because of its ongoing war in Ukraine means the first so-called ‘best-on-best’ men’s hockey tournament in a decade doesn’t feature some of the NHL’