Russian snowboarder Alexey Sobolev is a brave man, and not only because he’s currently taking part in the men’s slopestyle event on a course that prompted medal-favorite Shaun White to drop out citing safety concerns, via the Associated Press:



Sobolev took to the Olympic slopestyle course Thursday with the bottom of his board painted with a knife-wielding woman in a ski mask. The picture looked very much like a member of Pussy Riot, the all-woman Russian protest punk band jailed two years ago after a performance in a Moscow cathedral that did not sit well with Russian authorities.

Asked by reporters about his board, Sobolev played coy. “Anything is possible,” he said. “I wasn’t the person who designed the board.” He also declined to say whether he was a fan of Pussy Riot, the protest/punk band that continues to draw attention to the sins of Putin’s government. But one look at the board makes the homage fairly clear:

Wow, Russische (!) snowboarder Alexei Sobolev komt naar Sotsji met een Pussy Riot-board. http://t.co/VCPvyMem1hpic.twitter.com/QkUsKpnFq3 — Job de Wit (@JobdeWit) February 6, 2014

Read the rest of Slate’s coverage of the Sochi Olympics.

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