THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
The USA men's hockey gold medal, won over Canada in overtime, produced far more fallout off the ice than it did in the rink – apart from Jack Hughes' front teeth, there was actually very little during the match.
You probably saw at least a little of it: the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Kash Patel, partying in the US team's locker room, chugging beers and spraying himself and the players' with it, all supposedly a part of his taxpayer-financed research trip to study security in Milan. Matthew Tkachuck hung his gold medal round Patel's neck in mid-Maga celebration. Of course a video surfaced on the internet showing Patel criticizing his predecessor, Christopher Wray for using official jets for his own purposes. Of course he did.
Patel could have stopped off in London and visited me to ask for advice. In 1996 I was the venue manager for the Atlanta Olympic basketball host television feed, and part of my job included security in the press and player areas. Obviously when the USA basketball team played, that could be a challenge, to the point where the boss of the venues, whose name was Mark, sent out a memo forbidding managers like me from using empty press seats to allow access. Before the gold medal game, I got a call from his office, asking for some passes to said seats for Mark, and I told his secretary to reference "Mark's memo telling me I can't do that". Would you be surprised if I told you I wasn't asked back for the 2000 games (though as a commentator I made a triumphant return in 2012 in London and 2016 in Rio)?
But the next day, after the US won the gold, I was down in front of the team's locker room, trying to stop the unaccredited from getting in. One of the people I turned away was the late Jesse Jackson. I explained politely why he couldn't come in, but if a player wanted to tell me he was invited, that would be OK with me. I then added, "and I voted for you for president". He looked at me with stunned silence. "Really?" "Yup". "Oh, thanks".
Now, it appears USA team general manager Bill Guerin actually had invited Patel to party with the team, so maybe my lesson would have fallen on deaf ears. But once in, Patel made the situation even worse, getting his boss on the line, so that Donald Trump could invite the US team for a tour of the White House and so much more. "Of course, we're going to have to bring the women's team too," he said, the women having won their gold three days earlier but without a phone call or invite from the president. Trump continued, "I believe I probably would be impeached if I didn't!" Of course, any such impeachment would never get past Congress, but no matter. This comment was reported as Trump "joking", though nobody referenced the joke as "locker room talk" which goes back, if you have a memory, to the pussy-grabbing tape that emerged during the 2016 election.
The USA women's team, who had similarly defeated Canada in overtime for their gold medal, respectfully declined Trump's offhand invite. The officials of USA hockey were polite, citing the players' commitment to their professional schedules or college responsibilities. They then were invited to party in Las Vegas with Flavor Flav, and some individuals accepted that sincere honor. But USA captain Hilary Knight, whose goal in the final minute of regulation sent their gold medal match to overtime, went back to her team, the Seattle Torrent, and discovered Trump's begrudged invite was the main talking point in the Professional Women's Hockey League. Asked about the president's "joke" she responded, "It was distasteful and unfortunate … now I have to sit in front of you and explain someone else's behavior, and that is not my responsibility."
In the end Trump welcomed 20 of the 25 men's team, all of whom had the same commitments as the women (except all of them are full-time NHL pros) to the White House. The five who didn't attend had their own reasons; there was no boycott by the four players from Minnesota, which has been under attack by ICE. Trump put them on display at his record-breakingly long State of the Union speech, trying to get the rub from their victory, and then put them in a room at the White House where they were given a presidential dinner of take-away McDonald's, with no Trumps in sight.
I wrote a year ago in The American about the fallout from the 4 Nations Face-Off, and its politicization in the wake of Trump's persistent boasts of making Canada the 51st state. Many people bemoan the intrusion of politics into sport, but I'd argue it's sport that intrudes into politics: why else would the Olympics hoist flags and play anthems in each medal ceremony? Anyone who was around in 1980 will recall vividly what a political boost the triumph of the USA team, all but one actual college players, over the USSR's Big Red Machine, gave to a country whose morale was at a low point like, as Trump would say, "you've never seen before". There hadn't been a similar response when the all-amateur 1960 US team beat the Soviets at Squaw Valley. This gold medal in Milan was the USA's first ever 'on the road', as it were – like England's football team they'd been assumed only to be able to win the big one at home (and England even had an English referee in 1966).
Trump had emerged as the big loser from the 4 Nations, when Canada beat the USA, again in overtime. That was after the US had beaten the Canadians 3-1 in a round-robin match in Montreal, where out-of-character Canadians actually booed the US anthem, and the US players, Matthew and Brady Tkachuck, played 'Hanson Brothers in Slap Shot' and started a fight at the opening face off of the Face Off. After the Milan games, Brady (who is captain of the NHL's Ottawa Senators) was accused of saying he had to "teach those maple syrup-eating f'ers a lesson", but that turned out to be as real as the tasteless White House produced meme of Trump on skates slicing through Canadians, itself an echo of the Russian footage of Putin from some years ago, skating through a team of players afraid to touch him as he scored goal after goal.
The problem with analyzing the politics of hockey today is that the realities on ice reverse the real world. In the real world, Canada is the uneasy smaller neighbor to the north, and like other smaller neighbors of bigger, brasher countries, their national game is at the core of their identity (and yes, I know hockey shares that distinction with lacrosse in Canada). But think of rugby in New Zealand (against Australia) or Wales (vs England, at least back in the old days) as the core of national identity. And think about the countries who play more intensely than those who dominate, but don't necessarily base their national identity on that – say Japan at the World Baseball Classic. Or the odd four days every two years when Britain becomes European to defeat the seemingly lackadaisical Americans in the Ryder Cup.
In terms of participation, ice reduces the US to something like Canada sized, but the game means far less, and in the big moments Canadians will point to their gold medal wins over the US in fully professional tournaments like the 1991 Canada Cup, 1999 World Cup, and the 2002 and 2010 Olympics. This is why, despite both teams in Milan being made up entirely of NHL players, the US could still be seen as (perhaps even plucky) underdogs, though nothing like the 1980 Miracle on Ice skaters.
The women are a different story. They managed to check the monkey on their backs a long time ago, and they were solid favorites in their gold medal game, though Canada rose to the occasion and bar Knight's heroics, Canada may have scored the upset. One point to remember: the current Olympic format of overtime is to play sudden-death with three skaters for each team, which is an improvement over a shootout, but opens things far more than five on five, which favors the team with more depth or better defense.
In their 4 Nations overtime, Canadian goalie Jordan Binnington had made a series of brilliant saves to keep his country alive. He was very good in the Olympic final during regulation but the US goalie Connor Hellebuyck (who plays his NHL hockey in Winnipeg) was playing out of his pads, stopping a Canadian team which physically dominated the US from taking advantage of that domination. His backwards save of a Mitch Marner shot, with the handle of his stick, was one of the great saves in international history. That the US could get the game into overtime also depended on a superlative individual goal by Matt Boldy, who flipped the puck between two defenders and managed to gather it in after squeezing between them. But most hockey people didn't doubt that Canada's play would have continued to be dominant if the overtime had been five on five skaters. One other point: Canada managed to draw high-sticking penalties in the final minutes of both their semifinal win over Finland and the gold medal game by exaggerating the contact with the head, as if they were Italian soccer players. However the US didn't allow a power play goal throughout the Olympic tournament, including killing off a 5 on 3 deficit against Canada.
Interestingly, both the USA and Canada had eschewed a number of their best goal-scorers when they picked their rosters. The US left off Dallas Stars' Jason Robertson and the Montreal Canadiens' Cole Caufield and Lane Hutson, the latter an offensive minded defenseman, as coach Mike Sullivan of the New York Rangers went with bigger players better on defense. The decision was an echo of Herb Brooks' choice of good skating forwards ahead of some better scorers in the 1980 team that produced the sort of close, tight game that was decided in OT. This time around the referees were mostly from the NHL, and in this case they – for the most part – let the players play.
The Olympic Award for Diplomacy belonged to Wisconsin's Republican congressman Derrick Van Orden who quipped that, "were Canada the 51st state, they'd have won the gold". Canada's PM, Mark Carney, answered Trump's AI hockey meme with footage of himself skating with real hockey players (he was a backup goalie at Harvard as an undergrad).
In another sense, the USA/Canada final was a conscious example of how politics has affected the sport. Back when Canada won the first "open" pros vs state players tournament, the 1973 Summit Series (which, when I wrote about it last year, was the quintessential demonstration of the Canadians' refusal to lose in their sport) hockey had six major players: Canada, the USSR, Finland, Sweden, the USA and Czechoslovakia. The US might even have been considered the sixth of six.
But now the USSR is Russia, and Latvia, who used to contribute a few players to the national team via Dynamo Riga, are independent. Czechia and Slovakia are separate countries. Germany is now one country: the DDR (East Germany) hockey league had only two teams, in East Berlin and Weißwasser. Both were called Dynamo (the name for army sports club teams in both DDR and USSR). As the US has improved, so too have smaller hockey countries like France, Switzerland, Austria, Denmark and Norway, though none have the resources and infrastructure to break through to the top level. What that means is that we can expect more US/Canada matchups when the pros go against each other (the NHL will again pause its season for the Olympics in 2030) and we will see how much energy and pride surges through the hearts of those professional players when they skate for their nations.
But for two sweet days, Kash Patel and Donald Trump got to bask in the reflected glory of America's hockey stars, and those stars got to play their parts in Trump's self-aggrandisement. I recalled in 2020 General Mark Milley leaving Trump's photo call in front of a church in Lafayette Square when police cleared the square of protestors and Trump stood with an upside-down Bible. Defense Secretary Mark Esper told Milley "We've been duped, we're being used", and Milley said "This is a political event, and I'm out of here."
The hockey players left their McDonald's and returned to their NHL teams. Ten days later Trump joined Israel's air strikes against Iran.
