skating between hockey arena and political arena (or: how the US men's team actually lost)

Bryn Evans • February 26, 2026

Chapter Tags: History, Politics

This article was originally published on Substack.

When “sports” and “politics” are mentioned in the same sentence, your mind might first go to Muhammad Ali, “The Greatest,” who famously rejected conscription, using his global platform to protest American military involvement in Vietnam and the treatment of Black people in the US South. The ensuing Cleveland Summit, a meeting between Ali and renowned Black athletes Jim Brown, Bill Russell, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, as well as political leader Carl Stokes, at which the latter group agreed to support Ali’s stand, was widely considered a significant but largely freestanding moment in the fusion of sports and politics.

Fifty years on, the refrain from many sports fans has become a resounding “keep politics out.” The backlash against then-49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick throughout the 2016 season for kneeling during the national anthem each game in protest of police brutality was swift and decisive, not only from fans but from the NFL apparatus itself. Playing the 2016 season on an expiring contract, Kaepernick, a reasonably skilled player who pundits almost invariably agree deserved at least a back-up quarterback role on an NFL team, failed to obtain a contract offer come the 2017 offseason. Kaepernick maintains that his untimely exodus from the league was direct retribution for his attempts to use his sporting platform to elevate a political message. A lawsuit filed by his representatives against the NFL alleging team owners colluded to keep him out of the league was confidentially settled in 2019. Yet, many fans and sports executives are content with Kaepernick’s effective exile, and were vexed at the time that his political protests were even allowed to continue for a full season.

As 2026 Olympic men’s hockey golden goal scorer Jack Hughes lamented after widespread criticism of the men’s team welcoming FBI Director Kash Patel to their locker room celebrations in Milan before raucously laughing at President Trump’s sexist dig made at the women’s gold medal-winning team, “everything is so political.” Why did folks on social media get so incensed about these chummy interactions, or the fact that the team took President Trump up on his offer of a White House visit, while the women’s team politely declined? Hughes offered a straightforward explanation for the team’s choices: “We’re athletes. We’re so proud to represent the U.S. No matter what your views are, we’re super excited to go to the White House tomorrow and be a part of that.”

So, is it as simple as that? A bright line drawn between politics and sport, athletes adhering purely to their role as entertainers and quietly accepting whatever political leadership is ascendant at any given moment? Unfortunately it’s not quite so cut and dry, Jack.

The “keep politics out” refrain rests on the simple premise that sport is escapism: no matter your political background or beliefs, for those 48 minutes, nine innings, or 100 metres, the only thing that matters is your enjoyment of the spectacle. Political allegiances vanish, replaced by a shared joy in supporting one’s team. Sport, seen in this light, is the ultimate practice of inclusivity.

And for a sporting event being played in a vacuum, this argument holds a lot of water. When you go to your kid’s softball game, an occasion experienced only by the young players and their families in attendance, it should be irrelevant who believes in what. Introducing politics into a game meant to promote teamwork, confidence-building, and bodily well-being would be counterproductive.

Yet, holes in the escapist line of thought begin to appear when the vacuum is unsealed, and the amateur softball players are transformed into highly paid, world-renowned professional athletes at the pinnacle of public visibility.

Pro athletes make a lot of money, and while we can debate whether they deserve to be paid in the tens of millions, the reality is that these salaries have only been increasing. In the eight years between 2017 and 2025, the incomes of the top 100 richest athletes in the world doubled—and even in 2017, most of these athletes made more in one year than the average person would make in a lifetime. So whether or not you agree with the monstrous sums, it is worth asking what has driven this rise.

The short answer? It’s not the escapist entertainment value of sport which fully, or even arguably primarily, drives athletes’ enormous paycheques. Around the major sports leagues, fans have consistently decried rises in ticket prices, arguing that paying multiple hundreds of dollars to get into the stadium reduces the accessibility of the sport in question. In other words, we can’t attribute rising athlete salaries to the pure entertainment value of sports.

Rather, it’s the lucrative endorsement deals for individual players, teams, and leagues, in combination with expanding marketing efforts and a broader fanbase, that have supported the elevation of athletes in both public stature and pay. Pro athletes are paid, first and foremost, to be ambassadors—of teams, of lifestyles, of brands, of model conduct, of nations. Sure, at the most basic level, we care if a particular athlete excels at the sport they play, but fulfilment of this simple criterion is most often then turned into justification for placing the athlete on an even higher commercial or political pedestal.

Athletes, sometimes even more than parents or mentors, show young, impressionable children how to act. They are venerated in a way that few others in society are, and their ability to inspire the masses is unbelievably powerful. Team owners know this. League executives know this. Corporate marketers know this. And politicians know this.

In the 1980s, victorious American teams in the top sports leagues and international competitions began being consistently invited to the White House to meet the President. This tradition isn’t a mere congratulatory field trip for the winning team. It’s an elevation of athletes to the level of political subject. It’s a promotional photo opportunity. It’s an affirmation to the country and the world of the “Americanness” of winners.

If this assessment seems like a stretch, just ask American statespeople about the political importance of athletes. In the 1920s, as American swimmer Johnny Weissmuller rose to international stardom following resounding victories at the 1924 Paris Olympics and 1928 Amsterdam Olympics, the State Department devised a plan to use his success to market American culture and commercial products around the world. As historian Mark Dyreson explains, "Johnny Weissmuller represented the best-selling brand produced by the American Olympic industry. He promoted American civilization as the embodiment of the common belief that sport produced social capital."

Weissmuller’s renown propelled him to a future career in Hollywood. And he was not alone: fellow Olympians Duke Kahanamoku and Buster Crabbe were also thrust into film, as well as made the subjects of regal promotional photoshoots:

It’s also no surprise that dozens of athletes from a variety of sports pursue political careers following retirement from competition. The public eminence of sporting life translates favourably to the political world, where success is so often determined by emotional associations rather than effective policy. Americans Michelle Kwan, Arnold Schwartzenegger, Steve Largent, Heath Shuler, Bill Bradley, Jim Bunning, Jesse Ventura, Kevin Johnson, Dave Bing, and Burgess Owens, among others, have ridden athletic fame to political success, while internationally the list includes Manny Pacquiao, George Weah, Imran Khan, Sebastian Coe, Vitali Klitschko, Romário, and Ken Dryden.

Even aside from the public acclaim of individual athletes, sports themselves have a long history of being leveraged for political ends. In the 1890s, Teddy Roosevelt, famous for promoting character-building through living the “strenuous life,” gave a series of speeches attesting to the importance of American football. For Roosevelt, the recent closing of the western frontier (a.k.a. the eventual colonization of Indigenous groups all the way from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific coast) meant that the country sorely lacked the intrepid masculinity by which it had come to define itself; football, with its aggression and physicality, could restore the country.

Following the US acquisition of the Philippines from Spain in 1898, American military personnel implemented a rigorous program that trained locals in baseball, basketball, and boxing. For the minds behind American imperial expansion, sport was crucial to the project of Americanization and the spread of Western democracy.

In fact, even the practice of playing the national anthem before sporting events, today an unassailable pre-game ritual, has its roots in political messaging: during World War I, amidst public criticism of professional baseball players for being draft dodgers, the MLB began playing the anthem to attest to the league’s patriotism.

Since at least the late 19th century, then, athletes and the very sports they play have been used to reify what it means to be American. And nowhere is this relationship more apparent than at the Olympics, with American athletes stepping into a quasi-diplomatic sphere as they serve as delegates for their home nation-state on the global stage. Jack Hughes himself admitted to the representative mantle the US men’s hockey team takes on as he professed: “We’re so proud to represent the U.S.” Even in this simple quote meant to justify the separation of sport and politics, Hughes is invoking the political category of the nation-state and his own role in personifying it. At the Olympics, individual athletes become secondary to countries, medal tallies posted beside national flags rather than athletes’ names.

American involvement in international sport, more than any other form of sport, sells a culture, a belief system, a code of conduct. Take the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, boycotted by USSR nations, four years after the US had boycotted Moscow’s own rendition of the Games. Speaking against the backdrop of the Cold War, Ronald Reagan offered a pre-Olympics speech to the 614 American athletes competing in LA, lauding the importance of American patriotism and the need to promote “an affection for our way of life, expressed by people who represent the width and breadth of a culturally diverse society.” To United States politicians, the summer of 1984 represented a chance to sell its political values to the world through sport.

The 2026 US men’s gold medal-winning hockey team (minus five of its more conscientious players) indeed took President Trump up on his offer to visit the White House and attend the State of the Union address, flying on Tuesday, February 24th to Washington D.C. on a government-chartered plane. Several of the players chose to sit out their club games the following day in order to attend. And it should come as no surprise that during the visit, Trump took the opportunity to imbue the sporting merit of the team’s victory with political value, bestowing upon goalie Connor Hellebuyck the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the U.S.’ highest civilian honour awarded to “individuals who have made exceptional contributions to the security or national interests of America, to world peace, or to cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.”

While it’s not unprecedented for athletes to receive the Medal, it’s traditionally given to those who not only excel in their sport but have made important contributions to American society or national interests—think Jesse Owens, Babe Ruth, Muhammad Ali, Jackie Robinson, Billie Jean King, or Michael Jordan. Hellebuyck, a back-to-back Vezina Trophy winner as the NHL’s top goalie, Hart Trophy winner as the NHL’s most valuable player, and now Olympic gold medallist and undisputed star of the final victory over Canada, hasn’t made societal contributions in anywhere close to the same way as the aforementioned names, unless of course you consider pure hockey prowess as socio-politically important. The decision to award the Medal to Hellebuyck cements his status as an American icon, fusing sporting achievement with political importance.

Put simply, sports, and the athletes that excel in them, hold power—and in any power dynamic there exists a necessary political question. But here’s the real rub: even if you still maintain that sport’s only role is as a vehicle for inclusive entertainment, it can’t fulfil that role under certain political regimes. When political figures joke that women’s sporting achievements matter less than men’s, advocate for the exclusion of trans athletes, and shape childhood education systems that systemically exclude certain ethnicities, sexualities, and economic backgrounds from competition, sport ceases to be a unifying source of blissful escapism for all. The shimmering mirage that allows fans to immerse themselves in an entertaining, untroubled world for the duration of the game begins to only appear before those of a certain privilege. For everyone else, sport is no longer a joyful escape but the perpetual struggle for acknowledgment of their deservingness to play.

And when, as a professional athlete, you associate with a political figure that thrives off hateful rhetoric, willingly allowing your social capital to be coopted for the benefit of this person, you become directly involved in the political message they’re espousing. Laughing alongside, and wearing the branded MAGA hat popularized by, someone signals at the very least a tolerance of their beliefs. The millions of children who look up to you for your athletic skill take notice of who you rub shoulders with, especially when that shoulder-rubbing is broadcast live on every television channel.

The American women’s hockey team won gold in Milan on Thursday, February 19th, but didn’t receive even a whisper about a White House visit until Trump’s satirical reference to inviting the women to avoid impeachment, made in his congratulatory call to the men’s team following their gold medal win three days later on Sunday, February 22nd. You can plead to the public, as Jack Hughes and other men’s players did, that the two American teams have deep mutual respect, but taking the President up on his offer under these circumstances, as members of the women’s team speak out about their feelings of embarrassment and exclusion, speaks volumes.

I doubt many sports fans would advocate for openly partisan athletes, and perhaps rightly so. Wading into discussions of competing policies should only come after years of specialized education and training. Still, this does not mean that sports and politics are separate. Athletes are role models, trend-setters, and respected voices. On some level, every athlete needs to acknowledge these hats they wear. In a world where politics permeates discussions of personal identity and national belonging, sports and politics are two sides of the same coin. The very apolitical, escapist fantasy that makes sport so enticing to such a large swathe of fans is threatened when athletes fail to recognize their necessary political role.

So, I would just remind you of this, Jack Hughes; the next time you’re thinking about popping champagne with a politician: sport and politics are and will always be inextricable. The question isn’t whether you intend to make a political statement; it’s whether you recognize that you already have.