The 2026 Winter Games delivered a sweep of American triumphs — twelve gold medals, dramatic overtime hockey wins and a long-awaited figure skating champion — even as many reporters chased political angles and manufactured controversy around athletes instead of celebrating performance.
The image that sticks is simple: Megan Keller backhanding an overtime puck into the net, and then the men doing the same four minutes later, the first American men’s hockey gold since the 1980 Miracle on Ice. Forty-six years between those moments, one tournament with the American flag in the rafters twice and Team USA finishing with twelve gold medals, the most ever for an American team at a Winter Olympics. Those facts are impossible to ignore on the scoreboard.
But much of the coverage treated the Games like a sandbox for politics. In a pre-Games press conference, reporters pushed athletes to explain how it “felt” to represent the United States “right now.” The questioning turned routine appearances into headlines before the competition even began.
Freestyle skier Hunter Hess answered that it brought “mixed emotions.” Figure skater Amber Glenn spoke about community struggles. Both athletes were responding to questions they were asked, and both quotes were then amplified into larger narratives.
That amplification included a public jab on social media when Trump called Hess a “real loser” on Truth Social, and a chorus of reaction that followed from every direction. Congressman Byron Donalds told him to go home, and outlets seized on ripples and framed them as a crisis of the moment.
One outlet even ran a piece offering therapist guidance for Americans “struggling to root for Team USA” while Trump is president. Jemele Hill wrote in The Atlantic that athletes were being put in an “impossible situation” — asked to account for Trump, then attacked for doing so. The framing made it sound like controversy landed from the sky.
That framing gets the order wrong. The so-called impossible situation was not accidental. Reporters decided which story they wanted and then used their access to create the material to support it. Athletes answered honestly under pressure and the resulting fallout was portrayed as if it had arrived without human hands at the press conference table.
There is, of course, a place for athlete expression. Saying something on your own terms is part of free speech. But there is a meaningful distinction between an athlete volunteering a stance and a journalist engineering the moment to manufacture a sensation. One is citizen speech, the other is a calculated news beat.
That pattern plays out again and again: pick a narrative, confirm it with access, then present the predictable blowback as proof of a crisis. Athletes become instruments for a storyline. The journalists, having lit the match, act surprised when the room catches fire. Meanwhile, competitors who deserve the spotlight find it crowded by manufactured drama.
Consider Alysa Liu. She retired from skating at 16 after the 2022 Beijing Games, then returned and won the 2025 World Championship. In Milan she skated a career-best 226.79 and became the first American woman to win Olympic figure skating gold in 24 years while performing to a Donna Summer suite. The crowd roared for the performance itself.
That’s the story. If Donald Trump’s Truth Social posts, or peppering those same athletes with political questions, is your story after that, you’ve lost your mind. The competition produced clear champions and defining moments; reducing them to political soundbites is a choice, not a necessity.
Skier Nick Goepper put it plainly: “Our country’s been having issues for 250 years,” he told reporters, and “I’m here to uphold classic American values of respect, opportunity, freedom and equality and project those to the world.” That spirit was the prevailing instinct across the team and it defined how most athletes wanted to represent themselves.
The women’s hockey team went 6-1, outscoring opponents 33-2, and Hilary Knight, 36, in her fifth and final Olympics, tied the gold medal game with 2:04 left by deflecting a shot with the goalie pulled, breaking the U.S. Olympic record for career goals and points in the same instant. Keller then ended it in overtime. Two days later the men beat Canada in overtime for the first time since Lake Placid.
Two overtime hockey golds over Canada in one Games, a figure skating gold ending a 24-year drought, and a national record in total gold medals gave 330 million people something unanimous to cheer for. That is what major sporting events are supposed to do; they create shared moments that rise above partisan noise.
Politics and sport have never been perfectly separate. There will be legitimate coverage when politics touches athletes and teams. But asking a question is different from engineering a controversy, and coverage that prioritizes the contrived dispute over the performance is a choice, not objective reporting.
The 2028 Summer Games will be in Los Angeles, and the same press corps will come with the same assignments and instincts. Alysa Liu came back, skated what she wanted, and became an Olympic champion without needing a political subplot. The journalists will have another chance to notice American greatness on the ice and slopes rather than making the games about themselves.
I know who will be president then, and that we’ll be in the middle of a presidential race. Will these journalists cover the event, or will they try to force athletes into becoming the story they want to write? It’s yet another reason why no one should care when outlets like the Washington Post gut their departments. If this is what journalists are capable of, what’s the point?
