Article #242864

• Football club donation equal to prize money Ukraine pays gold medallists

• Heraskevych barred from racing while 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.