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America’s image has been taking a beating at the Winter Olympics. First, there were protests over the presence of ICE agents in Team USA’s security detail. Then, JD and Usha Vance got booed at the opening ceremonies. Now American athletes are speaking out about their country’s domestic dysfunction.
In PR, the industry term for this kind of situation is “shitshow.”
“I hope that I can use my platform and my voice throughout these Games to try to encourage people to stay strong,” figure skater Amber Glenn said at a press conference last week.
For Olympic skier Hunter Hess, “it brings up mixed emotions to represent the US right now.”
Hess’s comment evidently struck a chord, because President Donald Trump blasted him on Truth Social: “He shouldn’t have tried out for the team, and it’s too bad he’s on it.”
A question for Americans, both those who sympathize with the dissident athletes and those who support the administration: Do you ever hear the Russian athletes criticizing their government? The Chinese? North Koreans?
Of course not. Those regimes would never tolerate the (frankly, mild) criticism American athletes are now voicing. There’d be duct tape over the mouth of any Team PRC athlete before they could get out the Mandarin for “mixed emotions.”
I should know. I represented the Soviet Union on the global chess circuit from a young age. A KGB handler always accompanied me for chess tournaments abroad. Before I turned 20, the Soviet government kept my mother back in the USSR in order to discourage defection. The communist authorities essentially made her their hostage.
Apparently, this is what MAGA wants to emulate.
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Look, I don’t expect a conservative Republican to stand by every word of a left-leaning athlete’s protest. But all patriotic Americans should celebrate the openness that allows people to speak their minds. The problem is that the Trump administration and its boosters see that openness as a flaw to be excised—a bug in the system—rather than a point of pride for the nation.
“You don’t go overseas, REPRESENTING America…and bash the US,” commentator-turned-Trump apologist Megyn Kelly admonished the outspoken Olympians.
In other words, you have rights so long as you don’t use them.
I eventually spoke out against the communist regime—even as I represented the USSR in chess. In 1989, I had an interview (with Playboy, no less!) in which I said:
There may be two political spheres in the world today, but the normal lifestyle exists in only one of them, and that is not here in the Soviet Union. Here is what I would call a distortion of normal life. It’s like living in a house of mirrors. Well, the only way out is to smash those mirrors.
A year later, I became the first person to compete in any sport under the Russian tricolor (back then it was a symbol of democratic resistance to Communist Party hegemony). The Soviet system was opening up by then, but it was far from a democracy. Criticism still carried risks.
Today, I’m mostly retired from chess. When I do appear, I never play under the Russian flag. With a genocidal war in Ukraine, the Putin regime and its legions of enablers have taken the country too far. If you’ve seen me on television or at an exhibition match, you’ll notice that I’ve replaced the Russian white-blue-red banner with a white-blue-white lapel pin to represent the opposition.
The shame I feel for my homeland is considerably less important than the physical suffering Ukrainians endure every day. Still, it is a terrible thing to lose your flag and your country. You lose your rootedness. Your community. It’s something you don’t appreciate until you’re adrift in the sea of nations.
The United States is not so far gone. American Olympians are not tearing the stars and stripes from their uniforms, nor condemning America as illegitimate. The Team USA athletes are speaking out because they still can (although the administration’s hostile approach to free speech does not bode well for the future).
Hunter Hess, the skier who found himself in Trump’s crosshairs, followed up with another message after the president’s Truth Social tantrum:
There is so much that is great about America, but there are always things that could be better. One of the many things that makes this country so amazing is that we have the right and the freedom to point that out.
I can think of no better credo for the American people.
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