MILAN — Fifty-eight years ago, during their medal ceremony for the 200m race, Americans Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists in a silent protest, an expression of Black Power support. Incensed, IOC president Avery Brundage kicked the American track medalists out of the Olympic Games and threatened to expel the entire United States delegation. 

Fifty-eight hours ago, give or take, Ukrainian skeleton pilot Vladyslav Heraskevych displayed a helmet bearing the images of more than a dozen athletes and coaches who have died in Ukraine’s ongoing war with Russia. IOC president Kirsty Coventry met with Heraskevych, sympathizing with his message and pleading for him not to wear the helmet during the moments of his actual competition. 

By the IOC’s rules, Heraskevych could wear the helmet during practice, he could display it during press conferences, he could even — hypothetically — show it during a medal ceremony. He just couldn’t wear the helmet during competition. When Heraskevych refused to concede that condition, the IOC removed him from his lone event. 

Two protests. Two demonstrations of belief in something bigger than the Olympics. Two removals from the Olympics, yes, but under very different circumstances — one with vengeful anger, one with regret. The International Olympic Committee, one of the world’s most tradition-bound organizations, is changing — glacially, but changing nonetheless — with the times. 

Freedom of expression, in every sense, is coming one day for the Olympics. So why not now? Why not today? 

Andrew Milligan - PA Images via Getty Images

In 1968, the International Olympic Committee spokesman called Smith and Carlos’ silent protest “a deliberate and violent breach of the fundamental principles of the Olympic spirit.” Brundage demanded that Smith and Carlos be removed from the Olympic Village. When the United States Olympic Committee, as it was then known, pushed back against Brundage, he threatened to boot the entire United States delegation — every single American athlete — from the 1968 Olympics. 

On Thursday morning, IOC spokesman Mark Allen told assembled media that “we dearly wanted (Heraskevych) to compete. It would have sent a powerful message. We were happy to provide him with a number of occasions to express his grief.” What a difference six decades makes — by the IOC’s current standards, Smith and Carlos’ protest would have been perfectly acceptable. 

Coventry noted that the IOC did not have a problem with Heraskevych speaking his mind … outside the boundaries of the games themselves. "It's not about the messaging,” she said Thursday, “it's literally about the rules and the regulations. In this case, the field of play, we have to be able to keep a safe environment for everyone, and sadly that means no messaging is allowed."

Thing is, with Russia, the IOC has already done some indisputable messaging of its own. Russia, as a collective nation, has been banned from the Olympics since 2022 because of its invasion of Ukraine. Not to get too simplistic here, but banning an entire nation from the Olympic Games is a political message written in the skies, not just on a helmet. 

The key question, of course, is this: Once you open this door to in-competition messaging, where do you stop? It’s not difficult to imagine how one athlete’s noble protest of a crushing war becomes another athlete’s partisan protest of a political candidate, and before long you have athletes protesting for a whole range of less-than-genocide-level causes. 

The IOC doesn’t often inspire sympathy, but you can at least see the immensity of the problem they’re facing here. Does the IOC restrict protests to certain areas of the body, or certain sizes, like brand logos? How would the IOC determine what causes are “protest-worthy”? If protest is permitted on a helmet, why not a full uniform? And what about the rights of athletes from other countries who might be on the other side of the issue under protest? Shouldn’t they get a say in this, too? 

Allen, the IOC spokesman, noted that the Olympics already offers athletes a method of expressing grief, which is a black armband. But given the fact that, by the IOC’s estimation, there are 130 conflicts ongoing in the world at this moment, where does one draw the line? “If everyone is allowed to express themselves in that way beyond a black armband,” Allen said, “it will create a field of play which becomes a field of expression. And even where one may or may not agree with the sentiments, you can see where that would lead to a chaotic situation.” 

It’s easy to dismiss this entire controversy with a wave of the hand: This is the Olympics! Can’t they put their protests aside for two minutes? But for many athletes, consumed by challenges and fears and trauma most Americans can’t imagine, the protest is the point. The remembrance of those lost, the desire to hold the guilty to account, the dream of a better life … for them, those goals are their true calling, and the Olympics are just their vehicle for making the world hear their cries. 

If there’s a bright side to Heraskevych’s Olympic expulsion, it’s this: His protest now reaches much farther than it ever would have if he’d simply been permitted to compete without incident. It’s a classic case of the Streisand Effect, where the IOC’s attempt to shut down and smother a protest has the effect of magnifying it. His voice and his cause reach much further now than they would have in any other circumstance, even winning a medal. 

The time will come, soon, when athletes will be able to make the statements they wish to make, when they wish to make them. But that time won’t be soon enough for Vladyslav Heraskevych and his Olympic dreams.

MILAN — Tradition holds that when you win an Olympic medal, you get that medal draped over your neck fairly quickly — usually a few minutes, maybe a half-hour at most. Most Olympians generally don’t have to wait two and a half years, and circle half the globe, to finally receive their medals. 

But then again, most Olympians aren’t medal-winning figure skaters competing against the Russians. You combine the inherent drama of figure skating with the corner-cutting, line-blurring and outright cheating of Russian delegations, and you get what happened with Madison Chock, Evan Bates and the rest of the 2022 Olympic figure skating team: a Winter Olympics medal ceremony in the height of the summer. 

Chock and Bates, who began their quest for an individual gold on Monday night, are the only repeat Olympians from a remarkable moment in Team USA figure skating history: a medal celebration at the height of the 2024 Paris Olympics to present medals to winners of the 2022 Beijing Olympics. 

The story revolves, as so much else has over the last few Olympic Games, around Russian doping. Chock, Bates and the rest of the 2022 American team won silver at the Beijing Games, placing second behind Russians skating under the acronym ROC (“Russian Olympic Committee”) due to past doping violations.

However, tests had determined that Russian team member Kamila Valieva had taken a banned substance prior to the 2022 Games. With Valieva’s status — and, thus, that of the entire Russian team — in doubt, the IOC held off on awarding any of the medals, either to the Russian athletes or to the silver medalists of the United States and the bronze medalists of Japan.

The U.S. team left Beijing without a medal of any color, and for nearly two long years afterward, their trophy cabinets remained empty. Finally, in 2024, the International Skating Union rendered its decision: Valieva’s numbers would be stricken from Russia’s total, moving the United States into the gold medal position and Japan into silver. (Russia, not Canada, received the bronze on a technicality, which was a north-of-the-border scandal all its own.) 

So the United States had won gold after all. But the gold medals were now locked up in a vault in Lausanne, Switzerland, where all unclaimed and unallocated medals reside. How would America’s skaters get their rightful medals with the appropriate level of ceremony and respect?

The solution was elegant, if not simple: the IOC awarded the medals at a special ceremony during the Paris Summer Olympics in 2024. “We got on the airplane knowing we were already going to get a gold medal, which was great,” Bates said recently. “We didn’t have to perform or compete.”

“No stress!” Chock joked. 

In a sharp contrast with the austere, zero-audience COVID-era Beijing Olympics, the Paris Games were a celebration of all things Olympics, open to all. The United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee used that fundamental difference to ensure that the figure skating team got what their 2022 medal-winning colleagues didn’t: a full-on family celebration. 

“The USOPC really did a phenomenal job treating all the athletes really well,” Bates said. “They brought out friends, family, coaches. Everybody was ecstatic.” The ceremony came just a few weeks after Chock and Bates were married. It’s safe to say they had a very good summer.

Under a brilliant blue Paris sky, the team walked into Champions Park, hands held high, smiles on every face as the national anthem played. 

“It was hard to describe how wonderful it was,” Bates said. “It really was magical.” 

“It was also a reunion with our teammates, most of which we hadn't seen in two years since Beijing,” Chock added. “So it was really fun to be reunited with them and share that Olympic spirit again.”

The photos from the ceremony radiate joy as the American and Japanese teams stand before the Eiffel Tower with their medals won in Beijing. The Russian skaters did not show up to receive their bronze medals. 

“After a two-and-a-half year wait, it was as good as it could have possibly been,” Bates said. “And it was just a wonderful way to close off that chapter.”

Now, the duo are on to their next chapter in Milan. They’ve already won another team gold to accompany their Beijing one — and this one didn’t require any waiting. 

For all their team hardware, though, Chock and Bates have not yet won an individual medal. This is their fourth consecutive Olympics together — Bates also competed in Vancouver as part of another pair — but to date, they haven’t ascended the podium as individuals. That streak could well end later this week. They ended the free skate portion of the ice dance event in second place, their score of 89.72 just behind the French team of Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron’s 90.18. 

“We felt really strong, we felt like it was even better than a team event,” Chock said afterward. “It's the feeling of accomplishment when you did your best on ice, and the rest isn't necessarily all up to us, so we're really proud of how we skated, and proud of how we controlled what we could.”

Chock and Bates will return to the ice on Wednesday night with hopes of adding a third gold medal to their collection … and with hopes that it won’t take very long to hold in their hands.