Quick hits: Emotional helmets and hakas as Bradbury clips Paul

Source : ABC NEWS

Steven Bradbury hits Jake Paul with a drive-by as he celebrates Jutta Leerdam’s Olympic gold, while a Sydney-born Kiwi receives a special celebration.

Here are the quick hits from the Winter Olympics.

1. Heraskevych’s helmet

At the 2022 Games in Beijing, days before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainian skeleton athlete Vladyslav Heraskevych held up a sign that read “No War in Ukraine”.

Four years later, Heraskevych began his campaign in Italy wearing a helmet depicting some of the Ukrainian athletes killed since then.

Reuters reported that some of the athletes included on the helmet were “weightlifter Alina Perehudova, boxer Pavlo Ishchenko, ice hockey player Oleksiy Loginov, actor and athlete Ivan Kononenko, diving athlete and coach Mykyta Kozubenko, shooter Oleksiy Habarov and dancer Daria Kurdel.”

Heraskevych told Reuters the Olympic Committee had contacted the Ukrainian team about the helmet, with the Olympic Charter outlawing any “kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda”.

“It’s still being processed,” he said to the agency.

2. ‘Really special’ haka for silver medallist

Zoi Sadowski-Synnott just missed out on adding gold to her snowboard big air bronze and silvers from 2018 and 2022, settling for another silver behind Japan’s Kokomo Murase.

The Sydney-born New Zealand rider, who won gold in slopestyle in 2022, celebrated her silver medal and received an extra honour from the whole team on the mountain.

“I didn’t know that was happening,” she said.

“I just went and saw my family, and then turned around, and the whole team was performing a haka for me, and it was really special. It meant a lot to me.

“I feel very honoured to have carried the New Zealand flag in the Opening Ceremony and to represent my country, New Zealand, Aotearoa.

“My whole family’s out there. All of my teammates’ families are out here. It’s really special to have the support from everyone and to share this experience and enjoy the Olympics and the spirit.”

3. Bradbury’s dig at Jake Paul

With more than 5 million followers on Instagram, Jutta Leerdam is a legitimate speed skating superstar.

And she was electric on day three in Italy, claiming gold in the women’s 1,000 metres with an Olympic record time of 1:12.31.

But outside of winter sport circles, she is also renowned as the fiancee of YouTuber-turned-boxer Jake Paul, who was in attendance as Leerdam broke new ground in Milan.

And Paul was overcome with emotion as Leerdam flew towards glory, cheering and sobbing in a video he posted to Instagram, the caption reading “MY BABY JUST SET THE OLYMPIC RECORD.”

The couple is well known for supporting each other’s sporting endeavours — but, on commentary for Channel Nine, Australian Winter Olympic great Steven Bradbury was in no doubt about who was the more talented of the pair.

“I reckon she’s a better skater than he is a boxer,” Bradbury said.

4. Skeleton power couple go head-to-head

Ranked first and ninth in the world, Belgium’s Kim Meylemans and Brazil’s Nicole Silveira are two of the world’s finest skeleton athletes.

They also happen to be married.

On day three, the couple went head-to-head in the official training for the event, with Meylemans finishing in eighth and claiming spousal bragging rights.

The pair were already together when they competed at Beijing 2022, but this is their first Games as a married couple, having tied the knot in 2025.

In an Instagram post celebrating their wedding, Meylemans wrote that competing together in Italy, where same-sex marriage was not allowed, would be a golden opportunity to “shine a light on marriage equality”.

5. Sharing is caring

Before today, there had been a total of 30 “shared” medals in the history of the Winter Olympics.

By the end of it, that number had risen to 32.

In the men’s team alpine skiing, the Austrian pair of Vincent Kriechmayr and Manuel Feller combined for a time of 2:45:03, exactly the same figure as Swiss duo Marco Odermatt and Loïc Meillard.

That meant that, after 170 gates and 4,000 metres, both teams received silver medals, with the bronze not being awarded.

And only a matter of hours after that, lightning had struck twice, with Japan’s Ren Nikaido and Switzerland’s Gregor Deschwanden both finishing with 266 points in the men’s normal hill ski jumping to share the third step of the podium.

Before today, the last shared medals came in 2018, with Canada and Germany uniting for two-man bobsleigh gold and Norway’s Marit Bjørgen and Finland’s Krista Pärmäkoski sharing bronze in the women’s cross country skiing.