Winter Olympic Meltdown

Overall, the Winter Olympics in Milan and Cortina were more enjoyable than the 2022 Beijing Winter Games, but then the Chinese Communist Party didn't exactly set the bar high.  But of course, leave it to members of Team USA to ruin whatever enjoyment we viewers managed to derive from watching the competition.  Back in 1998, when women's ice hockey debuted at the Nagano Winter Games, it was believed that men played ice hockey and women couldn't.  The American teams proved that, here in the U.S. at least, the opposite was true.  The women's team, having won the gold medal that year, got to meet President Clinton at the White House; the men's team, the first one staffed by National Hockey League professionals and having been eliminated from medal contention, wrecked their rooms at the Olympic village in Japan like British rock stars playing the Tokyo Budokan would wreck their hotel rooms. They were bad losers.

In 2026, they were bad winners.  After their win over Canada for the gold medal, the American men's ice hockey team partied hearty in the locker room and received a phone call from Donald Trump. Trump invited them to the White House and added that he had to invite the women's team, who won their gold medal in a game with the Canadian women, otherwise "I do believe I probably would be impeached."  The men laughed uproariously and delivered salutatory dittos while FBI Director Kash Patel (WHAT?????) downed a bottle of beer in their company.  

Trump didn’t invite the women's ice hockey team to the White House, despite his insistence that he did, but they saved him the trouble by declining an invitation.  The men's team not only showed up at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, they showed up at the State of the Union address to be celebrated as representing the best of America.

Yes, the U.S. men's national ice hockey team represents and embodies America - literal locker room talk, misogynistic attitudes, toxic masculinity, and overall boorishness.

And by the way, we have no business to celebrate the U.S. men's ice hockey team's recent achievements.  David Rothkopf pointed out something quite disturbing.  The last time the men's team won the Olympic gold medal, Rothkopf noted, they defeated the Soviet Union for a berth in the gold-medal game, and their victory was sweet because it marked the triumph of a country that stood for freedom over a country that stood for tyranny.  Today, the U.S. victory over Canada in the gold-medal men's ice hockey game marks the victory of a nation representing authoritarianism over the country fighting to save freedom - Canada, meaning that, whereas the Americans won the gold medal in men's ice hockey in 1980 as the good guys, this time they won it as the bad guys.  The same would hold true for the American women's victory over the Canadian women, except for one thing - the American women aren't part of Trump's vision of an America made great once again.  I think he just made that well understood.

Meanwhile, I found out one thing about the Milan and Cortina Winter Games that is, in fact, worthy of satire.  The medals minted for the top three finishers in each event are of lesser quality than medals of previous Games.  In other words, they break off their ribbons and break in two when they hit the floor.  For all the money spent on the Olympics, you'd think the International  Olympic Committee would have spent more on quality control for their prize hardware.  Alysa Liu had her team-figure skating gold medal break on her, and she had to return it for a new one.  So, everyone is pleased as punch that the American men's ice hockey team won the gold medal, though . . . when you get right down to it, here we have a bunch of NHL pros with a bunch of booby prizes as fragile as gold-wrapped chocolate Hanukkah shekels.   

Meanwhile, looking forward to 2030, one of the leaders of the organizing committee for the 2030 Winter Olympics in France stepped down because he didn't play well with others. Among the committee members, their left hands don't know what their right hands were doing.  This should be interesting . . .. 

Russian Interference

The United States men's hockey team lost big time at the PyeongChang Winter Olympics to the Olympic Athletes from Russia team, 4-0.  What was galling about this game is not that the Americans lost to a Russian team.  What was galling is that they lost to a team that should not even be there.

Sportswriters are inevitably blaming this defeat on the National Hockey League for not letting its players take a couple of weeks off to participate in the Winter Olympics and forcing national teams to rely on college students and minor-leaguers, which decimated the American and Canadian teams more than it did the Russian team, and even though veterans of the 1980 "Miracle on Ice" team may disagree, there is probably some truth to this, as the Russian team was able to find enough players from a major professional league in Russia itself.  But that's hardly the whole story.  The anti-doping ban on the Russian Olympic team made exceptions for athletes who don't have any record of cheating with steroids, and while I expected female figure skaters to dodge the ban, I never thought that there would be so many Olympic athletes from Russia who technically aren't competing for their country still being able to compete in Winter Olympic events.  Nor did I suspect that there would be an opportunity for enough Russians to compete in a team sport like ice hockey.  Both sexes.  As I see it, the International Olympic Committee's exemption on the ban against Russia that allows drug-free Russian athletes to supposedly compete for themselves and not for their country is comparable to a man who gives up buying and eating baked goods for Lent - cake, pie, muffins - but making exceptions for cake, pie and muffins he doesn't have to pay for . . . and being married to a pastry chef who takes home some of her work.   

I'll come right out and say it: The ban on the Russians is a joke.  The mere presence of a men's hockey team from Russia at these Games, even if it doesn't compete under their red, white and blue flag, is courtesy of a big loophole that one of the Flying Wallendas could have jumped through.  Heck, there are so many "Olympic Athletes from Russia" in PyeongChang that the Russians might as well have sent an official team there.  Look . . . a ban is a ban.  No Russians should mean no Russians.  Sometimes the innocent have to pay for the crimes of the guilty.  Life isn't fair, and it shouldn't be any fairer to today's Russian athletes than it was to  the Soviet-era Russian athletes who had to stay home during the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics . . . or the American athletes who had to stay home during the 1980 Moscow Summer Olympics.  (Why didn't the International Olympic Committee allow would-be 1980 U.S. Olympic team members compete as "Olympic Athletes from America" in Moscow then? They didn't want the boycott.  Jimmy Carter did.)      

Oh yeah, I ought to tell you about that 4-0 hockey game, which got so violent as Russian and American players were devolving into fistfights with each other.  The Russians were especially aggressive, getting away with a lot of crap that the referees didn't seem to think was worthy of penalties.  There's no doubt a lot of animosity between the Americans and Russians, thanks to this election-interference issue, and this game was certainly reflective of it - and a black eye for Donald Trump, who all but promised the return of détente with Russia in the 2016 presidential campaign.  But that doesn't justify all of this unnecessary roughness.  Back in the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, which took place after the Soviet invasion of Hungary, Hungarian and Soviet athletes went at each other, and a riot almost started when a Hungarian water polo player got cut badly over his eye during the U.S.S.R.-Hungary game.  The problem of Russian bots smearing Hillary Clinton isn't as serious as a full-scale military invasion in which people die. 

But again . . . the Russians shouldn't be competing at PyeongChang in the first place.

Red Face-off and White Washing

American men are behaving badly at the Winter Olympics again.  Including Shaun White.

First, to get it out of the way, the U.S. men's ice hockey team.  Ahead 2-0 over Slovenia, the Americans suddenly collapsed and lost 3-2.  After the American women beat out the Olympic Athletes from Russia team in a shutout (5-0), the men shut down. Which prompted all of those silly Americans chanting "We're number one!" to shut up.  (At least one of the current White House residents, I'm sure, was secretly pleased.)  

As if seeing our guys live up to the tradition of American national men's teams choking weren't bad enough, we now learn that Shaun White is yet another celebrity involved in a sexual harassment case.  White has his own rock band, appropriately titled Bad Things, with a female drummer that has since left the band after White did . . . bad things.  To her.  It was since been reported that he texted her pictures of  private parts, and he has also been accused of having shown her hardcore porn, forcing her to drink vodka, trying to make her change her look to appear sexier, and making her smell something, uh, personal.  After his gold-medal victory in these PyeongChang Winter Games (the one hundredth gold-medal victory for the U.S. in the Winter Games' 94-year history), White, who settled with the woman out of court, admitted to the first charge but not the others, dismissing the rest as "gossip."  White sounds like a guy who's addicted to cocaine, crystal meth, and tobacco and only admits to smoking.

White has since apologized for his poor choice of words ("gossip?") and how he handled the story when it came to the fore; the case, for the record, was settled out of court.  He admits to being in a dark place at the time of his fourth-place halfpipe showing at the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014, leading to his bad behavior.  But the truth is that White has always been in a dark place of sorts.  No one in snowboarding likes him because of his swagger and self-importance. "To so many who saw the text messages, read the allegations," Jeff Passan of Yahoo! Sports wrote about White's magnificent comeback on the halfpipe course this week after his Sochi disappointment, "the notion of redemption was nothing more than a canard to distract from a far uglier story."

I'm not going to equate the U.S. men's ice hockey team's misdemeanor of sucking to White's high crimes.  But to see both stories at the same time has certainly caused a pang of rue for anyone who expected our guys at the Winter Olympics to be shining examples of American manhood in the Age of Trump.  Uh, fellas, could I see you in my office?