Some names are permitted on helmets. Others are disciplined into silence.

The Olympics claim political neutrality while operating as one of the most powerful political stages on earth — a system that decides which deaths can be mourned publicly and which must remain offstage. They apply a moral filter on grief: Ukrainian losses ritualized today, Palestinian ones deemed too political.

I was thinking about this as I watched the story of Vladyslav Heraskevych unfold at the 2026 Milano-Cortina Winter Olympics.

The Ukrainian skeleton racer arrived with a “helmet of remembrance” bearing the faces of Ukrainian athletes and coaches killed in the war with Russia. Many commentators framed him in hushed, reverent tones: here was “a powerful message… of remembrance, of memory” (IOC President Kirsty Coventry), a “tremendous tribute” bearing faces like figure skater Dmytro Sharpar and weightlifter Alina Perehudova among 24 killed compatriots.
The IOC disqualified him.

Olympics Rule 50 prohibits any political, religious, or memorial expression on the field of play. They offered compromises: display it pre- and post-race, wear a black armband in competition, or a moment of silence. Heraskevych refused them all. He wanted the faces with him while he competed. So they disqualified him — not for who he mourned, but because he insisted the mourning occupy the exact same moment as the competition.

Yet the IOC itself has never been neutral about which conflicts warrant intervention. It swiftly barred Russian and Belarusian athletes after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, treating them as representatives of the states that launched the invasion. But when Palestinian federations demanded similar accountability for Israel’s conduct in Gaza, the West Bank, and repeated truce violations — actions described by UN experts as embedded in the legal architecture of occupation — the IOC refused even to entertain the request.

The IOC presents this asymmetry as the outcome of neutral rules, but this “neutrality” is shaped and protected by powerful sponsors. The Games are built on a commercial ecosystem — broadcast partners, host‑nation alliances, multinational sponsors — each with its own geopolitical sensitivities. What gets framed as “avoiding politicization” is often just avoiding risk to the Olympic brand. Some grief is low‑risk and therefore permissible; other grief threatens diplomatic relationships or sponsor markets and is quietly quarantined. Neutrality here is a form of brand protection.

Now imagine a Palestinian athlete arriving in Milan with the faces of Palestinian martyrs or prisoners painted on their gear. The test is simple: the same rulebook, the same commentators — two mourners, two outcomes.

Do you believe the response would be hushed reverence? Do you believe the IOC would offer compromises, private meetings, and public statements of “understanding”?

The treatment of Palestinian grief across Western media and institutions makes the outcome predictable: The UN and international sports bodies that govern football and Olympic competition already record siege — amid reports of over 400 Palestinian footballers killed or starved since 2023, including stars like Suleiman al-Obeid (‘Palestinian Pelé’). Olympic officials brand any attempt to make that record legible — to honor those who did not survive or insist on the reality of collective loss — as “political,” “provocative,” or “divisive.” The Olympic ideal, so comfortable with the wounded body as symbol, recoils from the wounded voice as testimony.

Beneath this lies a deeper sorting: the IOC does not merely regulate expression; it regulates who is permitted to appear as a victim. Ukrainian athletes are framed as mourners carrying the weight of an unprovoked assault. Palestinian athletes, even when grieving teammates killed in siege conditions, are framed as potential provocateurs. The same act — naming the dead — gets read as human in one case and political in another. The line between “commemoration” and “provocation” is drawn along the fault lines of global power.

The irony is that the IOC already engages in memorialization when it suits the dominant narrative. The Munich 1972 memorial — now an institutionalized part of the Games — reveals the selectivity at work. It is a remembrance fully aligned with Western state narratives: a story in which Israeli victims are honored and Palestinians appear only as perpetrators. It is not a space where Palestinian grief is permitted to speak, only a space where Palestinian violence is invoked to reaffirm a moral consensus. The IOC has no objection to political memory when it reinforces dominant geopolitical alignments; it objects only when the memory comes from those whose losses destabilize that consensus.

Opening ceremonies routinely stage host‑nation, state‑sanctioned histories— mythologies of unity, resilience, and cultural harmony that present a curated national story as universal truth. Moments of silence are granted for tragedies deemed universally grievable. The Olympics’ problem is that they curate which histories are allowed to be sacred. Palestinian remembrance is treated as a political claim, while other forms of mourning are elevated to universal human tragedy.

In practice, the IOC’s rules on political expression operate as tools of speech control. They decide when and how human suffering may appear within the Olympic spectacle. Social media platforms do the same to Palestinian grief. The same language appears: safety, neutrality, community standards. The same curatorial power decides which atrocities trend and which are suppressed. Both claim universal values. Both enforce them selectively, in line with dominant geopolitical narratives. Both impose the same split on the human being: your witness is welcome here; your witness is “too political” there — and they decide the difference.

Heraskevych was right to refuse the terms of Rule 50, which vests the IOC with the power to decide whose grief is political and whose is commemorative. But until the rule is gone, the immediate demand must be its equal application: that Palestinian athletes be granted the same latitude now afforded Ukrainians.

He refused every compromise. He refused the split, lost his Olympic moment — but declared it “the price of our dignity” and vowed a CAS appeal. He forced grief into a spectacle meant to enhance forgetting. He refused to perform national branding while his dead waited offstage. And yet his grief was legible to us. It moved us. It was allowed to matter. Palestinians ask only that theirs be made legible, too. We demand the same moral grammar: grievable dead, hushed tones, respectful headlines, acknowledgment of lives that mattered.

The Olympics do not stand apart from the world; they are one of the world’s most polished technologies for deciding which dead may be named without consequence.

*

Click the share button below to email/forward this article. Follow us on Instagram and X and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost Global Research articles with proper attribution.

Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa. She is an activist, researcher, and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank. Visit the author’s blog.

She is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Featured image is from the author

Global Research is a reader-funded media. We do not accept any funding from corporations or governments. Help us stay afloat. Click the image below to make a one-time or recurring donation.