The horn sounds. Megan Keller takes a pass at the blue line, jukes past a Canadian defender, and backhands the puck into the net. Four minutes into sudden-death overtime, the United States women's hockey team has beaten Canada for gold. Two days later, the men do it too — the first American men's hockey gold since the 1980 Miracle on Ice. Forty-six years. One tournament. The American flag is in the rafters twice.

That's the story of the 2026 Winter Games—twelve gold medals for Team USA—the most ever by an American team at a Winter Olympics. And if you followed the media coverage, you might have missed most of it.

Questions Before the Whistle

Before a single race was run or a single skater hit the ice, reporters at a pre-Games press conference asked American athletes how it "felt" to represent the United States right now. Given the climate. Given the ICE raids, the protests, and the noise. Freestyle skier Hunter Hess said it brought "mixed emotions." Figure skater Amber Glenn spoke about her community facing hard times. Both were answering questions they were asked.

That was the match. What followed was the fire.

Trump called Hess a "real loser" on Truth Social. Congressman Byron Donalds told him to go home. The media, having struck the flint, then wrote extensively about the blaze. The HuffPost 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.

Hill's framing has the causation backwards.

Who Struck the Match

The "impossible situation" wasn't an ambient condition athletes wandered into. It was built, question by question, at a press conference before the Opening Ceremony. Reporters decided what the story would be, then used a microphone to gather the material they needed. Athletes answered honestly. The journalists then covered the reaction with alarm — as though the controversy had descended from the sky rather than been assembled in a Milan hotel conference room.

Athletes have every right to use their platform. That's free expression. But there's a meaningful difference between an athlete speaking on a topic of their own volition and a journalist engineering the moment. One is a citizen using their platform. The other is a reporter manufacturing a story and banking on fallout.

This is a recognizable pattern. Decide the narrative before the events begin. Use press access to confirm it. Then frame the predictable blowback as evidence of the very crisis you set out to document. The athletes become instruments. The journalists become protagonists. And somewhere in Milan, Alysa Liu is warming up for a free skate that is taking a back-burner to journalists with an ax to grind. 

The HuffPost therapist piece is almost too on-the-nose. Its premise: Americans are struggling emotionally to root for Team USA because Trump is president, and here's professional guidance. Consider what that assumes: a normal American watching a 20-year-old from West Oakland land seven clean triples and feeling conflicted. That the sight of Megan Keller celebrating on the ice with her teammates is somehow complicated.

That's not a story about Olympic fans. That's a story about the people writing about it.

The Hill and Atlantic coverage are more sophisticated, but they make a similar error. It's sympathetic toward athletes caught in crossfire — but it accepts without question that the crossfire was inevitable, structural, someone else's fault. It never asks who walked into the press conference with the matches.

Meanwhile, Liu retired from skating at 16, two years after the 2022 Beijing Games. She came back. She won the World Championship in 2025. She showed up in Milan ranked third after the short program and skated to a career-best 226.79, becoming the first American woman to win Olympic figure skating gold in 24 years. She skated to a Donna Summer suite. The crowd roared. She waited for the final two skaters and watched them both fall short.

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.

What the Games Were For

Skier Nick Goepper, 31, from Lawrenceburg, Indiana, put it as plainly as anyone on the team did. "Our country's been having issues for 250 years," he told reporters. "I'm here to uphold classic American values of respect, opportunity, freedom and equality and project those to the world."

That was the dominant instinct on this team. And the team delivered.

The women's hockey team went 6-1 through the tournament, outscoring opponents 33-2. Hilary Knight, 36, in her fifth and final Olympics, tied the gold medal game with 2:04 left in regulation — deflecting a shot with the goalie pulled, breaking the U.S. Olympic record for career goals and points in the same instant.

Then Keller won it in overtime.

The men followed two days later, beating Canada in overtime for the first time since a group of college kids stunned the Soviet Union in Lake Placid.

Two overtime hockey golds over Canada in the same Winter Games. A figure skating gold medal ending a 24-year drought—a national record in total gold medals. The Games did exactly what they're supposed to do — gave 330 million people something to agree on, something to cheer, something genuinely worth watching.

Politics and sport have never been fully separable — 1968, the boycotts, the Cold War Games. Athletes have always been symbols. They don't get to opt out. When the political climate is contentious, some coverage of that reality is legitimate.

But asking is different from engineering. The Goepper answer — the one that most closely represented the spirit of this team — got a fraction of the coverage that Hess's "mixed emotions" quote received. That's not neutral reporting of what was in front of them. That's a selection. Twelve gold medals later, that selection looks less like journalism and more like a decision made before anyone boarded a plane to Italy.

See You in L.A.

The 2028 Summer Games are in Los Angeles: home crowd, home turf, home pressure. The same press corps will show up with the same assignments.

Alysa Liu came back from retirement, skated the program she wanted, and became an Olympic champion. She didn't need a political story. She was the story. The press corps gets another chance to notice the greatness of American athletes in 2028.

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? Based on these Olympics, the journalists don't care about the champions at all, just themselves.

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?