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.