Not long after Team USA delivered a historic sweep of Olympic hockey gold medals in Milan, a video of the men’s locker room celebration emerged across the internet. Much of it was to be expected: laughter, lots of beers… and then FBI Director Kash Patel? Holding out his phone so that the team could all be on speaker phone with the President? It’s unsurprising that Donald Trump demonstrates his misogyny in belittling the accomplishment of the women’s team, but disappointing for many was the athletes who acted as accomplice in laughing along with it. While this instance should also be explored in tensions of misogyny and gendered exclusion in sport, I want to take an initial look at the discourse of the news media in covering this story. 

Many news articles have carried a similar refrain, positioning a great moment of joyful American unity quickly dampened due to the video: 

“Politics and culture wars were suspended for the length of three heart-stopping periods of hockey and one cathartic overtime. [...] In normal times, this would be an obligatory celebration for a championship team. They take presidential calls. They party too hard. They visit Washington and stroll through the corridors of power. But this isn’t a neutral climate. This isn’t a neutral president.” (Brewer, The Athletic)

“But instead of a prolonged celebration of two historic teams, the afterglow of the men’s gold quickly devolved into a political firestorm, one that stretched from Milan to the U.S. Capitol to the “Saturday Night Live” and “Tonight Show” studios in New York.” (Lazerus, The Athletic) 

This framing serves to reinforce the myth of sport as a great unifier, and oversimplifies the realities of American identity and political formation, gendered exceptionalism, and sport and nation. Understanding sport as a civic (thus national) ritual embedded in its political context, and as a key contributor to the imagined community that creates a sense of nation and identity, allows us to more accurately see sport as a site of pedagogy in “being American” (Ingham; Anderson). While these two excerpts above do acknowledge the political realities, they still frame their narrative under the persistent myth of sport as an omnipresent unifying force of national significance. 

A different discursive frame opts to not take the political seriously at all. A piece from The Guardian notes in the eighth paragraph that “Trump also referenced the U.S. women’s hockey team.” A USA Today writer believes “it’s perhaps lost that this controversy boils down to one man’s failed attempt at humor. [...] These are hockey players who won gold medals at the Olympics, not statesmen returning from abroad.” 

This specific phrase of “statesmen” is curious to me—to what extent are these athletes serving a statesperson-like function? Sport scholars such as Jules Boykoff have established that international sporting spectacles like the Olympics are a salient soft power force in pursuit of nation-building and state image, but a focus on the athletes’ specific role within that has seen less of a focus. Analyses of the Cold War era feature prominently, but not exclusively, in the literature, as do discussions of athlete activism in terms of their agency and political influence (see Murray and Price, 2023; Hartmann, 2003; Park, 2017 to start). Taking the Olympic Games and other high-profile international competitions as contributors to national image, the athletes’ position as representative must also be understood in this way. Does that make them statespersons? Officials? Dissidents? Or simply individuals divorced from any political meaning? While I say the certainty of this last question is “no,” the others present more of a grey area for understanding individual agency and national ideology in the sporting arena. 

With a few exceptions, the discourse thus far has seemed to only regurgitate the misconceptions of sport as formerly apolitical, made political in one moment, regardless of the evidence to the contrary. Thus, this phone call and its aftermath add a layer of documentation to this archive of sporting nationalism that we should ensure not to bury.

References 

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. Verso, 1983.

Boykoff, Jules. Power Games: A Political History of the Olympics. Verso Books, 2016. 

Brewer, Jerry. The U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team won gold — and then lost the room. The Athletic, Feb. 24, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7068426/2026/02/24/usa-mens-olympics-hockey-gold-donald-trump/. 

Dubinsky, Yoav. "Analyzing the roles of country image, nation branding, and public diplomacy through the evolution of the modern Olympic movement." Physical Culture and Sport. Studies and Research 84, no. 1 (2019): 27-40.

Foley, Douglas E. “The great American Football ritual: Reproducing race, class, and gender inequality.” Sociology of Sport Journal 7, no. 2 (1990): 111-135.

Giannotto, Mark. “Enough already. These USA hockey teams are worth celebrating | Opinion.” USA Today, Feb. 27, 2026. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/olympics/2026/02/27/usa-hockey-controversy-trump-joke-mens-womens-team/88900815007/

Graham, Bryan Armen. “Trump invites US Olympic hockey heroes to State of the Union in locker-room call." The Guardian, Feb. 23, 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2026/feb/23/trump-usa-hockey-call-state-of-union

Ingham, Alan G., Jeremy W. Howell, and Todd S. Schilperoort. “Professional sports and community: A review and exegesis.” Exercise and Sport Science Review 15 (1987): 427-465.

Lazerus, Mark. “Inside a wild week for the U.S. men’s hockey team: From gold to the White House to ‘SNL’. The Athletic, March 2, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7079069/2026/03/02/usa-hockey-mens-olympics-trump-white-house-snl/

Murray, Stuart, and Gavin Price. 2023. "Athlete Activists, Sports Diplomats and Human Rights: Action versus Agency" Societies 13, no. 2: 27. https://doi.org/10.3390/soc13020027

Murray, Stuart. Sports diplomacy origins, theory and practice. New York, NY: Routledge, 2018. 

Park, Michael K. “Long Shot: The Prospects and Limitations of Sports and Celebrity Athlete Diplomacy.” In Media: The French Journal of Media Studies 6 (2017). https://doi.org/10.4000/inmedia.855.