American freestyle skier Hunter Hess now says he "cannot wait to represent Team USA" — days after telling reporters he had "mixed emotions" about wearing the flag at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan. The reversal came after President Trump ripped Hess as a "real loser" and the backlash spread far beyond the White House.

Hess's follow-up statement, posted Monday on Instagram, struck a markedly different tone from his comments at a news conference last Friday:

"I love my country. There is so much that is great about America, but there are always things that could be better."

He added:

"One of the many things that makes this country so amazing is that we have the right and the freedom to point that out. The best part of the Olympics is that it brings people together, and when so many of us are divided we need that more than ever. I cannot wait to represent Team USA next week when I compete."

A fine sentiment. One that would have landed perfectly well on Friday — if that's what he'd actually said.

What Hess actually said

Fox News shared what Hess told reporters when asked how it felt to represent the United States with "things going on back home":

"It brings up mixed emotions to represent the U.S. right now, I think. It's a little hard. There's obviously a lot going on that I'm not the biggest fan of, and I think a lot of people aren't."

He went further:

"I think, for me, it's more I'm representing my friends and family back home, the people that represented it before me, all the things that I believe are good about the U.S. If it aligns with my moral values, I feel like I'm representing it. Just because I'm wearing the flag doesn't mean I represent everything that's going on in the U.S."

Read that again. An American Olympian — someone who made a national team, accepted a spot, traveled to Italy on his country's dime — publicly separated himself from the flag on his chest. He didn't say he was proud but concerned. He didn't say he loves America and wants it to be better. He said wearing the flag "doesn't mean I represent everything that's going on."

Nobody asked him to represent "everything going on." They asked him to ski.

The convenient catalyst

The source article notes that ICE enforcement incidents — the death of Renee Good during an encounter with ICE agents in January and a deadly encounter between Border Patrol agents and Alex Pretti — were "apparently used as the catalyst" for the comments from Hess and his teammate Chris Lillis. That word "apparently" does a lot of heavy lifting. Hess himself never specified what he was referring to. He gestured vaguely at "a lot going on" and let reporters fill in the blanks.

This is how the playbook works. You make comments ambiguous enough to earn applause from the right audience, then retreat to "I love my country" when the blowback arrives. The initial statement gets the headlines in friendly outlets. The walkback gets the headlines everywhere else. Both audiences hear what they want to hear.

But the ambiguity is the tell. If Hess had a specific, substantive critique — of a policy, an incident, an action — he could have made it. Athletes have done that before, clearly and directly. Instead, he offered vibes. "Mixed emotions." "Not the biggest fan." The vagueness wasn't accidental. It was the point.

The flag isn't a costume

There's a particular strain of modern progressivism that treats American identity as something you can wear selectively — embrace the passport and the training facilities and the funding, but distance yourself from the country when cameras roll at an international event. Hess essentially said he was competing for his friends and family, not for the nation that built the pipeline that got him to Milan in the first place.

Representing your country at the Olympics is not conscription. Nobody forced Hunter Hess onto that team. He tried out. He trained. He earned the spot. And then, standing on one of the biggest stages in sports, he flinched.

President Trump's response was blunt — he called Hess a "real loser" and questioned why someone who doesn't want to represent his country tried out for the team in the first place. It's a fair question, even if the delivery was characteristically direct. Millions of Americans would love to compete under that flag. For the ones who actually get the chance to treat it as a burden tells you more about the athlete than the country.

The walkback that proves the rule

Hess's Monday statement is polished, careful, and precisely engineered to sound patriotic without actually retracting anything. He loves his country. He also believes in his right to criticize it. Both can be true — and neither addresses what made people angry.

Nobody disputed his right to speak. The First Amendment protects his comments completely. But rights and judgment are different things. You have the right to complain about the food at someone else's dinner party. Doing it at the table, in front of an international audience, while wearing the host's jersey — that's a choice, and choices invite responses.

The pattern is familiar by now. An athlete makes a political statement on a global stage. Public pushes back. Athlete reframes the original statement as something milder than it was, wraps it in the language of unity, and acts as if the controversy was a misunderstanding rather than a disagreement. It wasn't a misunderstanding. Everyone understood perfectly.

Ski well, say less

Hunter Hess is a first-time Olympian. He grew up in Oregon, learned to ski at Mt. Bachelor, and worked his way onto the biggest stage in his sport. That's an accomplishment worth celebrating. It's also an accomplishment made possible by a country that funds Olympic programs, maintains training infrastructure, and sends delegations to compete under one flag — not a collection of individual brands.

He says he can't wait to compete next week. Good. Compete. Win if you can. But the next time someone shoves a microphone in your face and asks you to editorialize about your own country on foreign soil, maybe just say you're proud to be there.

Because that flag was never the problem. The mixed emotions were.