On the gold medal, how it got politicized, and how we've now lost the gold medal game itself
Some thoughts on what's happened in the past 72 hours since Team USA won gold in men's hockey.
I’ve wanted to re-live the men’s Olympic gold medal game from Sunday morning.
Wanted to talk about the save Connor Hellebuyck made on Devon Toews. The play by Zach Werenski to set up Jack Hughes in overtime. How good Dylan Larkin was throughout that tournament and what it means for his future. The what-ifs of what would have happened if Sidney Crosby was healthy? Heck I was even ready to have the heated debates with someone about the 3-on-3 setup.
As a sports fans, this is supposed to be the event we spend not days, but weeks and maybe even months re-living, where each micro decision on the ice gets overly explored and the game lives on forever as one of the coolest spectacles we’ve ever seen. Two of the best teams ever assembled, in a competition they themselves fought to be in, battling it out with gold on the line.
But within a few hours of the game being over we lost it.
Yes, the Americans still won and the Canadians still lost, but the game itself was highjacked and taken away.
Think about your conversations about the United States men’s hockey team in the past 72 hours, they haven’t been about what happened on the ice. They haven’t been about the sport or the athletic competition, but rather it’s been about what happened after Kash Patel, the FBI Director, was in the locker room after the win holding a phone with American President Donald Trump on speaker phone addressing the team.
There was a joke about how Trump would have to invite the woman’s team, which also won a gold medal, the players laughed, and a couple days later the men’s team was at the State of the Union on Tuesday night, while the woman’s team declined the invite.
Aside from some of the biggest hockey nerds I know, and I love those people, any conversation about the American gold medal now either starts or ends with Trump.
That’s the reality. It’s no longer a hockey achievement, it’s masterclass in politicization by an administration that has re-written all the rules about modern politics.
Sports themselves technically aren’t political, but once anything in life becomes a power source it inherently becomes a political pawn that can be moved around.
Athletes themselves are the easiest pawns to move, they live and breathe in a different world, for example of the players that play for the American men’s team, we hear the awesome stories about how 22 of the 25 players on the roster came through the National Team Development Program, how that setup has saved American hockey on the international level. And to an extent it has, look at the medal, but as someone who covers the sport and spends a good amount of time talking to past and present players from the NTDP program, I can tell you that “normal” modern life for those players has never existed.
As a 16-year-old they move and essentially enroll in a professional hockey program, they live with billets sure, but they go to school online and outside of their NTDP peers, they don’t have much human interaction. They enter an echo chamber of life, elite hockey player, that they never have to leave until they’ve retired from the game.
So I don’t expect professional athletes, hockey players specifically, to have well-informed political opinions either way. Many of them didn’t even know how escrow worked, I’ve explained that to more than a dozen players myself in the past couple years, and any real-world issues facing a player fit under the “I have an agent for that.”
That’s OK, they are humans and they have stories, but en masse they don’t and shouldn’t be considered experts on anything in the political or social field.
That’s why the past 72 hours have been tough to write about, because most of the players, I believe, don’t have any idea what they are doing one way or the other. Yes, many of them have college degrees and are probably smarter than I in various forms, but they live in a hockey world and echo chamber and make enough money where any outside problems are solved by money.
Again, this is the reality.
So when the men’s hockey team was partying with Patel or cozying up to Trump, they were being used as political pawns and many had no idea what they were doing. Making it even worse, any resemblance of an idea of what they were doing was probably shrouded even more by beers in their hand.
I didn’t want this to be political, I really didn’t. I wanted to watch this game and enjoy the Olympics and be able to joke about how the Americans finally beat Canada, I wanted to be able to have dumb sports debates about the event itself.
Instead Trump, as he’s done before, saw an opportunity to turn it into a win for his administration and move the pawns in the proper way. I’m not a political journalist, there’s a reason I don’t write about politics, but it doesn’t take a genius to realize how Trump changed the rules of the White House and the office of the Presidency from the rule of politics to the rule of celebrity. There’s a populous he has, he plays to that, and if there’s an opportunity to jump on it, he will always take it.
Again, this isn’t even me debating Trumps policies or whether you like him or not, that’s just the reality. American politics in the past 12 years have gone from political discourse to popularity battle, where claiming cultural and sporting events as your own is one of the most-coveted currencies.
It was bound to happen, truly there was no way Trump wasn’t inviting this team to the White House, whether it was in the locker room at the moment or a phone call later, the president was going to call. But I actually blame Team USA GM Bill Guerin for how this played out, how he put the gasoline on the political fire.
I really don’t care anymore about the roster construction or whether Guerin built the right team or not, we’ve lost the opportunity to even have that debate anymore. It’s well-documented that Guerin is friends with Patel, that he’s the one that gave the invite to the FBI Director the invite into the locker room and why before any player’s friends or family are even invited in, Patel is the only non-team member or staffer in that now famous video.
Guerin also lives in a hockey echo chamber, he’s an NHL GM, he’s also removed enough from his playing days and lives in a state, Minnesota, to understand what Patel represents right now in this country.
We want politics kept out of sports, it’s what we get told all the time, I get it. I want that, I want this to be a hockey game. I want to be able to talk to people about the game and not the aftermath.
But in the end, the GM of the team lit the fuze to politicize all of this, he willingly invited a political chess master into a room full of unknowing and inebriated political pawns.
He built the winning team, they won gold. But at the same time Guerin buried the game itself and everything else his team had achieved, turning it from a “grow the game” moment to a “who did you vote for?” moment instead.
I agree 100%, Sean. This falls squarely at the feet of Bill Guerin. He never should have brought Patel into the locker room, and he should have been far more prepared for how to navigate the politics that were absolutely—100%—inevitable.
I didn’t like his roster construction to begin with, and I still don’t. This mess only reinforces that view and makes me trust his judgment even less.
That said, the players bear some responsibility too. They should have been better prepared for the political realities that were obviously coming with this situation.
And shame on the President and his team for being so openly dismissive of the women’s program. If you actually look at the results, the women are carrying a huge share of the load for Team USA.
Out of 12 gold medals won by Team USA at these Olympics, six were won by women, four by men, and two by mixed-gender team events. That reality makes the dismissiveness toward the women’s team not just insulting, but indefensible.
Patels antics are well known to independent news outlets, but the MSM, for which most players are probably getting their info, don’t report as extensively what’s corrupt, incompetent prick he is.
To the more general question of player political maturation, what you say about their insularity is legit. But I can say for SE Michigan, where my son played gravel hockey, the economics of hockey sort of dictate that most of these players go home to pretty right leaning homes anyway. I’ve learned not to question people’s patriotism because we all have a right to it, but we also know how that flag is wielded in todays political environment, and I just came to expect that all my son’s teammates were of a singular disposition acquired from their parents. So, i. shirt, they have lots of reasons not to know what’s going on, but it probably looks fine to them anyway.