MILAN — The International Olympic Committee had no choice, really, but to disqualify the Ukrainian skeleton racer Vladyslav Heraskevych. Rules are rules.

For his part, Heraskevych, by putting himself at the center of a frenzy he could know with unequivocal certainty would explode to become the centerpiece of this first week of the 2026 Milano-Cortina Games, delivered a master class in orchestrating a media strategy to maximum effect.

This controversy threatens to become one of the defining storylines in the history — the telling — of the 2026 Winter Games. If it’s about rules, it’s equally — if not more — about narrative and, in this context, narrative’s increasingly frequent traveling partner, raw emotion.

MILAN — For those who know about California, and those who don’t: Oakland is east of San Francisco, across the Bay Bridge. The author Gertrude Stein grew up in Oakland. She would later write, famously, about her hometown: there is no there there.

In Milan, as it relates to the 2026 Winter Games: there is no here here. 

These Games have, like, zero buzz. 

MILAN — The great thing about sports and in particular the Winter Olympics is that predictions mean, literally, nothing.

In a medal almost no one saw coming, Ben Ogden took silver Tuesday in what in cross-country skiing is called the sprint — the first American medal in men’s xc ski since Bill Koch in 1976.

Fifty years of nothing and, in just over three minutes, bang. 

“It’s a dream, you know?” Ogden, 25, who grew up in Landgrove, Vermont (2020 U.S. Census: population 177), said afterward.

MILAN — The buildup to Sunday’s women’s Olympic downhill, Lindsey Vonn’s comeback story, had been extraordinary.

Then, just 13 seconds into the race, she crashed in an explosive shower of ice and snow. For the second time in 10 days — the fall Jan. 30 in Switzerland that destroyed the ACL in her left knee — she was airlifted off the mountain.

“It’s like the man in the arena,” Vonn’s sister, Karin Kildow said, citing Teddy Roosevelt’s famed speech from 1910. “She dared greatly. She put it all out there.”

Now, perhaps the most profound image that will linger from these 2026 Winter Games will be that helicopter framed against the sky — Vonn, in a red body bag, suspended, with what’s next a complete unknown.

MILAN — In her remarks Friday at the Milano-Cortina 2026 opening ceremony, IOC president Kirsty Coventry invoked the African philosophy called ubuntu.

The essence of ubuntu, linked in particular in history to Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Demond Tutu, is that one’s humanity is inextricably connected to the humanity of everyone else. 

What might ubuntu mean for the way the IOC operates, as a touchstone for key decisions, the way the organization — which dates to 1894 — positions itself in these middle years of the 21st century? The IOC is, has always been, Eurocentric. And now this rooted-in-Africa philosophy? Can Kirsty Coventry get ubuntu buy-in?