Posted on 02/11/2026 1:06:22 PM PST by nickcarraway
Olympic patriotism for Team USA just isn’t the same anymore.
We had a schtick here at SB Nation circa 2014 with the Sochi Winter Olympics, or more aptly, a social media strategy that led us to posting endless, tongue-in-cheek, jingoistic patriotism during the games. There were the traditional medal counts and tracking the achievements of U.S. athletes that were earnest, but also intentionally cringy images of Ronald Regan riding a velociraptor, a muscled George Washington covered in bandoleers, and Abe Lincoln smoking cigars.
It’s horrifically clichéd now, but it wasn’t back then. The intention was to juxtapose the honest, legitimate pride we had in the U.S. Olympians, with an online voice of supreme egotism and bombast — complete with North Korea-esque propaganda art.
Everything is different 12 years later. The joke propaganda art is now merchandise of the president. The isolationist attitude, once spoken of in jest, is now official foreign policy. It hits different to front a “rah, rah, rah USA” persona when concentration camps are being constructed, foreign governments are being toppled, and influential alleged pedophiles are being protected at the behest of a justice department in lockstep with the executive branch.
It’s just not fun to be patriotic with these games. It’s something athletes are struggling with too, as Rich Ruohonen of Team USA Curling said this week.
I’m proud to be here to represent Team USA, and to represent out country — be’d be remiss if we didn’t at least mention what’s going on in Minnesota. […] I am a lawyer, as you know, and we have a constitution… and what’s happening in Minnesota is wrong. There’s no shades of gray. It’s clear.”
Freestyle skier Hunter Hess echoed a similar statement.
“Just because I’m wearing the flag doesn’t mean I represent everything that’s going on in the U.S.”
Snowboarding phenom Chloe Kim was also asked about the sociopolitical climate in the USA, and discussed how she felt as the child of immigrants, and how she wants the nation to lead with compassion, rather than its current path.
NBC is grappling with this dichotomy as a broadcaster as well. During the gold medal game in mixed curling on Tuesday, one member of the athletes’ family was seen wearing a hat with the United States’ flag and the words “ANTI-TRUMP” on it. Not long after, three more family members were seen with similar hats. NBC’s solution was to avoid showing the family after the first end, instead cutting away to reaction shots of more palatable, traditional patriotism from fans in the cheap seats.
This eerily echoed the decision of NBC to edit out the vociferous boos Vice President J.D. Vance received at the opening ceremony, which aired live, but were diligently removed for the ceremony’s re-broadcast in prime time. It serves as an effort to portray a happy, sanitized vision of a unified America, devoid of the horrors being perpetrated on immigrants, the erosion of our relationship with the international community, and a media landscape that has become far too comfortable with censoring anything which might draw the ire of the president to the point where he’ll jump on Truth Social and single them out.
We’re left with an uncomfortable, complicated reality where we can either cheer for individual athletes and their stories, or put blinders on and still simply root for the USA like nothing else is happening in our nation. It’s a bad feeling either way. Normally it’s fun to cheer for the flag and our athletes representing it, with the only thing being U.S. excellence on our minds — but not right now. The sheen is gone from these games, and we’re left to navigate the messiness as best we can.
We were great. Not anymore.
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SBnation ^ | Feb 11, 2026 | James Dator(D)Leftistan
.....”.pure pukeage”
Brillant expression. Your original?
So we’re the only country on earth that’s not allowed to have borders and immigration enforcement?
The left wants a free for all where we won’t even have a nation don’t they?
Almost all the US Team have been wonderful. We had 4 idiots, but they are few.
What a bunch of bovine excrement!
Weak and feckless turds don’t deserve the USA.
“...we can either cheer for individual athletes and their stories...” which, more than likely, wouldn’t be stories if they didn’t live in this country. Since when did the olympics become an individual effort? Yes they are individuals, but they are on a team of Americans. They are supposed to represent their own country. My favorite line from the article “The sheen is gone from these games...”. How has that come about? Besides, it has always been said, you can’t polish a turd.
Didn’t Matt Lauer forcefully sodomise his co-worker at the Sochi Winter Olympics?
Everything is and will be Trumps fault long after we are all gone.
SB nation is the sports equivalent of Buzzfeed. 100% lefty garbage.
Mainly because now a lot of the athletes are millionaires, and no longer amateurs.
"If they interfere with changing the electorate to guarantee me a larger government stipend, then yes!" -- Typical Brainwashed Young American
BS. If the ‘offended’ athletes were truly patriotic it would matter to them that Trump’s presidency represents the will of the majority of American voters, and that stopping illegal immigration and deporting those who broke our laws coming into our nation illegally was and remains a highly supported priority of a large percentage of US citizens.
Meanwhile, Norway #1! Norway #1!
Sorry Jimmy. Your immature, pimp “athletes” ruined the Olympics. Don’t be a hater and try to blame the President of the U.S.A. When you got friggin’ lawyers participating in curling and figure that gives them some kind of platform to stand up on at the Olympic and spew their hate at the U.S., they are the ones ruining the patriotism at the Olympics and made the Olympics not worth the time watching them. A dumbass ass curler in a Michelin Man suit saying what is happening in Minnesomalia is “wrong” is something an idiot says. What is wrong is the communist left Party of Death dumping 20 million, ignorant, low I.Q., thieving foreign freeloaders on the backs of the American taxpayers and their families. Mr. Michelin needs to keep curling his ass and leave the grownups to talk about what is going on in the bizarre, Walz/Frey, Minnesomali Tampon summer camp outhouse.
No, not the ungrateful, woke, anti-American rabble rousers who got on the team. It wasn’t them.
Before Lindsay crashed, she ran her mouth. If she hadn’t crashed, she would have continued in the same way. There have been others as well. I’m happy for the ones that haven’t, but I don’t think any of them have taken the time to correct the ungreatful wokesters and chide them for running down the country they represent. If you find one, please correct me. I’ll gladly watch their particular performances.
No, but I’ve been using that term for many years now.
I looked it up....
Music: The title of a 2009 release, “Back To The Pukeage” by the band Puke.
(lol a band I have not heard of probably need to check it out)
Trump had nothing to do with it. The athletes who want to be political commentators did it all by themselves. Like so many others, they need to stick to what they know something about and do well.
They just blame everything on Trump whether he is at fault or not. No independent thought by these morons.
“Just because I’m wearing the flag doesn’t mean I represent everything that’s going on in the U.S.”
He is representing the Flag. He ought to get his mind right about what that is
People can hide behind what the NFL has done all day long. They can ignore what the flag stands for. No one will put them in jail. They have free speech.
Ok
The Flag, for any mouth breathing dope smoker out there who may have missed what they were saying while pledging allegiance to it, means the Declaration of Independence and the Republic
The gentleman who spent a month freezing, some to death, in Bastogne in the winter of 1944-1945 could tell that to these horrible excuses for men. But these diminutive creeps will never have the massive overwhelming crowds at their funerals at age 90 like those Airborne Rangers had. With the US Flag draped over their coffins
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