00:00Having been given one final opportunity this morning, skeleton pilot Vladislav Kariskevich
00:07from Ukraine was not able to start his race at Milano Cortina 2026.
00:13It's been an emotional morning.
00:29Beautiful helmet, beautiful work and a great tribute for the fallen athletes.
00:33It's very important and it's very important to keep them with me.
00:37Because of their sacrifice we are able to be here today on this competition,
00:41on these Olympic Games and I'm really grateful for their sacrifice and I believe that they deserve to be here.
00:47I've never wanted to have a scandal with MOC. I didn't create it. It created MOC.
01:00It's not about his message. It's absolutely not about the message that he wanted to give.
01:07It's simply the place. Even where one may or may not agree with the sentiments,
01:12you can see where that would lead to a chaotic situation.
01:16I disagree with this decision because I truly believe that we didn't violate any rules.
01:22In the end, sport without rules cannot function.
01:26We have to respect the rules. If we have no rules, we have no sport.
01:30It's written that political propaganda is not allowed, racial propaganda is not allowed and
01:35discriminational propaganda is not allowed. It's really hard to find anyone who will be
01:39discriminated by this helmet. I don't see any violations here.
01:42We can have a kind of universally agreed way of expressing grief, which is the black armband.
01:50I truly believe that I see don't have so much black bands to honor all the athletes who was fallen
01:55in this war.
01:56Athletes are allowed to give interviews. Athletes are allowed to express themselves on social media.
02:01We even talked about the fact that this athlete could carry that helmet through the mixed zone,
02:06so it would get seen.
02:08We have these rules in place to try and be fair and also to try and allow for
02:14us to do both things, right? To allow for athletes to express themselves,
02:18ourselves, but also to allow for athletes to be safe.
02:21You
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