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The 2026 Winter Olympics are in full swing and that means that all kinds of detestable propaganda and personal politics are put on display for the world to see.
Left-wing media, based in both the United States and abroad, were no doubt salivating at the chance to find U.S. athletes at the Winter Olympics in Italy and put them on the record condemning their own country. American skier Hunter Hess was happy to throw his condemnation into the pile, claiming that he had “mixed emotions” wearing the red, white, and blue, and that “it’s a little hard” because “there’s obviously a lot going on that I’m not the biggest fan of.”
HUNTER HESS SHOULD ‘HAND IN’ OLYMPIC UNIFORM IF HE’S NOT PROUD OF US: JOE CONCHA
Without speculating too much on Hess’s politics, this is the kind of embarrassing mindset that embodies the modern Democratic Party. For years, polling has shown that pride in being American tanks for Democrats under a Republican president, while the inverse is not true. If Hess were sitting at these press conferences in the first term of a Kamala Harris presidency, you can imagine he wouldn’t have these “mixed emotions” and all these things he isn’t “the biggest fan of” to complain about. He certainly wouldn’t be asked about them if he did.
Hess’s moment in the political sun accomplished two things. The first is that he showed his pride in America is based on which political party is currently in power in Washington, D.C. He confuses politics and patriotism and is more concerned with his association with the former than embracing the latter. Some of us are proud to be American even when politicians we dislike are in power and do things we disapprove of, and would never hem and haw about politics if we were able to represent our country on a stage as big as the Olympics.
The second thing Hess accomplished is that he played into the notion that something uniquely awful is going on in America. As my colleague David Harsanyi noted, “The subtext of the queries in Milan, and Hess’s answer, rests on an assumption that something especially nefarious is going on in the United States, which deserves rebuke; something worse, apparently, than goes on in any other country participating in the games.” Among other competing nations at the 2026 Winter Olympics are the following: China, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Venezuela.
This became particularly relevant when Eileen Gu decided to weigh in on Hess’s comments and President Donald Trump’s response. Gu, a San Francisco native, said that President Donald Trump calling Hess a “loser” is something that “really runs contrary to everything the Olympics should be.”
The problem, of course, is that it isn’t exactly clear if Gu is still American. Back in 2019, she decided she would represent China on the global stage, being rewarded with tens of millions of dollars in Chinese endorsements. In order to do so, Gu would have had to renounce her American citizenship, but it is unclear whether or not China simply bent its own rules to accommodate her and take an elite U.S. athlete for its own delegation.
It is one thing for Hunter Hess to be so publicly apologetic for his country because he doesn’t like whoever is sitting in the White House. It is another thing for Gu to chine in, ignoring that she is representing a genocidal, expansionist, communist government that would never allow her to say that anything about its leadership “really runs contrary to everything the Olympics should be.” Gu chooses to lay her victories at the feet of the Chinese Communist Party, serving as the Winter Olympics face of China’s noted Olympic propaganda campaigns, and then, only when she loses, claims that she is “carrying the weight of two countries.”
The Olympics’ indulgence of Chinese propaganda is also on display once again, this time in comparison to Ukraine. Ukrainian skeleton racer Vladyslav Heraskevych, who was the flag bearer for the Ukrainian delegation, was disqualified by the International Olympic Committee for violating its ban on political displays. Heraskevych wore a helmet with images of Ukrainians who had been killed in the country’s war for survival against Russia. This “helmet of remembrance” was deemed political because pictures of Ukrainians who were killed by Russia violate the rule on “political propaganda.”
Maybe you could understand this as an incredibly strict, iron-clad rule that is universally applied, but the IOC plays politics plenty. The most relevant example here would be with Russia, which the IOC “banned” from the Olympics over the very war in question here. Russian athletes are able to compete, but not under the Russian flag, instead listed as “Individual Neutral Athletes.” That, in itself, is a political statement by the IOC, whether they want to admit it or not.
The IOC goes even further, though, with its coddling of China. Like most useless global organizations, the IOC forces Taiwan to brand itself as “Chinese Taipei.” Taiwanese athletes cannot compete under or wear the Taiwanese flag, and the Taiwanese national anthem does not play whenever they win. For the IOC, dead Ukrainians are political, but China’s delegitimization of Taiwan with an eye toward conquering it is something that must be actively supported.
Then there is the new ridiculous politicization of international sports in the form of the transgender movement. This has been thrown back into the news when Algerian Olympic boxer Imane Khelif admitted that “she” had male genetics. Khelif spent the 2024 Olympics punching women in the face while having the biological advantage of being a man. The IOC allowed it because the IOC accepted the anti-science assertion that you are whatever gender you say you are, embracing the transgender political movement and signing off on Khelif abusing women in the ring on the way to his women’s boxing gold medal.
We have another case in the 2026 Winter Olympics, one that is less dangerous but just as ridiculous. That is the case of Elis Lundholm, a female skier competing for Sweden. Lundholm is a woman who is competing against women, which seems to be no problem at all. The kicker is that Lundholm claims to be a man.
If you are keeping up, that means the IOC thinks that Imane Khelif can compete against women if he claims to be a woman and that Elis Lundholm can compete against women if she claims to be a man. Where is the line? Wherever transgender activists say it should be.
To top off the insanity, NBC Universal, the American media partner for the Olympics, issued an official apology after a commentator referred to Lundholm as “she.” An athlete competing in women’s sports was referred to as a woman, and NBC felt the need to apologize for that. Not only that, NBC deleted the replay of Lundholm’s run, just to ensure that no one ever discovers that the person competing in women’s skiing was referred to as a woman.
This covers the whole scope of politics put on display at the Olympics. The contradictions of the transgender movement, the whining of U.S. athletes about domestic politics, and the double standards applied to countries that are not the genocidal Chinese government are now hallmarks of international competition, with each example over the years becoming more unbearable along the way.