On March 6, as the 2026 Paralympic Games opened in the Arena di Verona, Russia launched approximately 500 drones and 29 ballistic and cruise missiles at Ukraine. The Ternopil region was among those struck.

Eight members of Taras Rad's family were not home. They had already left for Italy.

They came to watch Rad compete. They bought their own tickets, made their way to the biathlon spectator stands at Tesero, and settled in for the sprint race the following morning. When they arrived at the venue, International Paralympic Committee and organising committee officials confiscated the Ukrainian flags they were carrying. The women in the group had neck scarves with traditional Ukrainian national ornament taken away. When Rad's mother asked for the written rule that justified this, she received only a verbal instruction: no symbols of Ukraine, Russia, or Belarus were permitted in the arena.

She later said it felt like the world was trying to forget Ukrainians, or to equate them with the country that had just bombed their region.

Rad went out the following morning and shot clean. Two hundred metres at the biathlon range, zero misses in the sprint event. He crossed the finish line in 19:55.5, more than a minute ahead of his nearest competitor. It was Ukraine's first gold medal of the 2026 Games.

A Leg Lost at 14

Rad grew up in the Ternopil region. Before para sports, he played football and competed in athletics. At 14, he injured his leg. Doctors at the first hospital he went to did not treat the wound properly. The infection spread, and to save his life, surgeons amputated below the knee.

He came home and started moving again almost immediately. "When I came back home after the hospital, I started to do different physical exercise," he said. "Sport helped me to forget about the injury." In 2014, he was introduced to cross-country skiing and biathlon through Invasport, Ukraine's adaptive sports organisation. He was 14, he had just lost part of his leg, and he was already training.

"I became much stronger, not only physically, but mentally and socially," he said. "I stopped being shy because of my injury."

By 17, Rad was finishing second overall in the biathlon World Cup standings. At the 2018 Winter Paralympics in PyeongChang, he was the youngest athlete on Ukraine's national team, 18 years old at his first Games. He won the 12.5km sitting biathlon event and returned to Beijing four years later with three more medals: two silver, one bronze.

The 2026 Games, in Context

When Milan arrived, Rad was 26, and the circumstances around him were unlike anything in his previous three Paralympic cycles.

Ukraine had boycotted the opening ceremony in Verona to protest the return of Russian and Belarusian athletes competing under their national flags. Before the Games even opened, the IPC had banned Ukraine's parade uniform because it included a map of Ukraine within its 1991 borders, ruling it political. The team designed new uniforms overnight.

The scarf incident was not isolated. Para-biathlete Oleksandra Kononova was cautioned over earrings bearing the phrase "Stop War." Ukraine's National Paralympic Committee described what it called a pattern of pressure since the start of the Games, unlike anything in the committee's 30-year history in the Paralympic movement. Ukraine's Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha and Minister of Youth and Sports Matvii Bidnyi issued a joint condemnation: "The International Paralympic Committee not only allowed blood-stained Russian and Belarusian flags, but tries to ban Ukrainian flags and even yellow and blue colours."

The IPC denied systematic bias, saying its rules on political symbols were applied universally and that the organisation had only learned of the grievances through the media, not through the daily chef de mission meetings. A spokesperson said venue security could not verify the meaning of the text on the scarves and so asked spectators to enter without them.

Ukraine led the medal table after Day 1 with six medals and three gold. They finished the Games with 19 total, third-highest in overall count and seventh in gold among 55 competing nations. Every single medal came in biathlon or cross-country skiing. Ukraine has won biathlon medals at eight consecutive Winter Paralympics, a streak that stretches back to Nagano 1998.

The family that came from Ternopil sat in the stands without their flags. According to Rad's mother, no written regulation was ever produced. No one was harsh about it. Officials took the flags and pointed toward the seats.