National Review Online
Thursday, February 26, 2026
The U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team didn’t just bring home
the first gold medal for the program since the 1980 “Miracle on Ice”; they did
so in dramatic fashion — with a game-winning goal in overtime against a stacked
Canadian team and an otherworldly performance by their goalie.
It was a wonderful moment for Americans, with plenty of
added human interest for the media to feast on. Jack Hughes had teeth knocked
out by a stick during the game, only to return to score the winning shot; his
brother and teammate, Quinn Hughes, had scored a game-winning goal in the
quarterfinals; and their mother, Ellen Hughes, won a world championship with
the 1992 U.S. women’s hockey team. NHL star Johnny Gaudreau was supposed to
play for the team but died tragically at 31 after being hit by a drunk driver
in 2024. Team USA’s players never forgot him, parading around with his jersey
after wins, and in a touching moment after the Olympic victory, they
grabbed his kids to pose with them in their team picture.
It was the stuff of a Hollywood movie, and yet, with the
champagne still spraying in the locker room, the American media already had
turned on them. All because they celebrated with FBI Director Kash Patel and
welcomed a call from President Trump. The supposedly problematic moment came
when they accepted Trump’s invitation to visit the White House and attend the
State of the Union, and laughed when Trump joked that he would be impeached if
he didn’t also invite the women’s hockey team. In the same call, he also
sarcastically said of the legendary performance by goalie Connor Hellebuyck
that he played “not bad.” (During Trump’s address to Congress, he announced
that Hellebuyck would receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom.)
In typical media fashion, journalists injected political
controversy into what should have been a unifying celebratory moment and then
commented on the controversy they had created as if it were reality. Former NBC
Meet the Press host Chuck Todd said
that Patel’s presence “helped sully the team.” A headline
from the New York Times read, “The U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team won
gold — and then lost the room.” Hockey writer Ian Kennedy lamented that the
players didn’t “apologize for laughing” at Trump’s remark. Reporters spent
all week asking men and women players leading questions, desperately trying to
create a rift where none existed, but all of them reaffirmed the close bond
among squads.
This would be the same media that spent the last several
weeks gushing over Eileen Gu, the American-born and raised freestyle skier who
competed for the oppressive Chinese communist regime. Beyond parody, Vox
even named the hockey team a “loser” in the Olympics while mentioning Gu as a
“winner.”
In this warped view of reality, Gu is a girlboss for
being unapologetic about her decision to be a paid propagandist for an American
adversary and a serial violator of human rights, while American hockey players
are attacked for being unapologetic about being gracious to the U.S. president.
When Alysa Liu took home gold for the United States in
figure skating, conservatives overwhelmingly celebrated, and leftists tried to
burst their bubble by resurfacing past comments that made her sound “woke.” Of
course, conservatives didn’t care about her actual politics, because she
represented America joyfully and proudly. In hindsight, progressives were
telling on themselves. They see everything through a political lens and cannot
be content to simply join others of all political stripes to enjoy a moment of
national pride.
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