✪ Rooting Against Anti-American Olympians Is A Patriotic Thing To Do

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etting the opportunity to represent one’s country in the Olympics is an incredible honor for any athlete. Sadly, some of this year’s American competitors don’t seem to fully appreciate that point.

Witness the cadre of American athletes who, invited by the international press to denounce Trump and criticize his administration’s immigration policies, have been only too happy to oblige. So many U.S. Olympians have done so that it’s become a major theme of these games. Newsweek even compiled a list of U.S. Olympians criticizing Trump so we could keep track of them all.

Throughout the first week of the 2026 Winter Olympics, several U.S. athletes have happily taken the bait from left-wing “journalists” seeking to get these Americans to trash their nation — and President Trump — on the world stage. Many of the comments thus far have specifically been focused on ICE and its efforts to deport foreign nationals illegally residing in the United States.

Team USA skiers Hunter Hess and Chris Lillis kicked off the performative struggle session during a pre-Olympics press conference. The athletes effectively wagged their fingers at the ICE agents under relentless siege by violent leftist agitators and talked about how “hard” it is to watch Federal law be enforced as they play games at an event surrounded by maximum security.

While Lillis displayed some level of decency by expressing his “love” for America, Hess took his criticisms a step further by claiming he has “mixed emotions” about representing his home country at the Olympics.

“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,” Hess said.

“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.”

Hess later tried to minimize his anti-American remarks in an Instagram post, writing, “I cannot wait to represent Team USA. …” The skiers were hardly the only American competitors to espouse anti-ICE and other leftist nonsense at this year’s Olympics.

The drift towards post-nationalism at the Olympics has been steadily growing since the end of the Cold War, but in these Milan Games it’s also taken on a new dimension in the singular person of Eileen Gu. The daughter of a Chinese mother and an American father, the 22-year-old Gu hails from San Francisco and is currently a student at Stanford. Yet she’s been competing as a freestyle skier for China since 2019, when she was only 15.

At the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, Gu won two gold medals and a silver for China. She’s already won a silver medal this time around and will likely keep medaling.

Gu of course isn’t the first American athlete to defect to China, but she’s certainly the most prominent—and likely the most wealthy. According to Forbes, Gu is the fourth highest-paid female athlete in the world, in just a few years amassing a fortune worth some $23 million. Of that, only about $100,000 comes from skiing, and the rest from lucrative modeling contracts and major brand endorsements, many in China where Gu is a superstar.

This makes Gu an ideal ambassador and propagandist for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In that role, she has dutifully avoided answering even the most basic questions about her citizenship. To compete for China in the Olympics, Gu must have a Chinese passport, and since China doesn’t allow dual citizenship there has been speculation for years that she renounced her American citizenship.

Gu maintains a carefully cultivated public persona and refuses to engage any questions about her citizenship or her absentee American father, whose name isn’t public. She carefully redirects any politically tinged questions, adopts woke positions on most issues she does speak about, and reliably parrots CCP talking points about how wonderful and open China is.

Gu speaks Mandarin and has spent time in China her entire life, yet she lives, trains, and goes to school in America. She lives in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in San Francisco (Sea Cliff), attended the private prep school University High School (tuition $68,090), and has enjoyed all the benefits of a posh upbringing in the United States. Yet Gu competes for China on the world stage, and has enriched herself immensely from it.

This makes her a traitor, more or less. Or at the very least a defector—and a useful one. American news outlets are covering her like they did in the last one—hyping her up as if she’s an American athlete, not a Chinese one.

The New York Times asked her along with all the other Americans about Trump’s riposte to Hess. She said exactly what you might expect: that she was disappointed the attention was on Trump’s comments and not the unifying spirit of the Olympics. “I’m sorry that the headline that is eclipsing the Olympics has to be something so…”—and here the Times reports Gu paused to choose her next word carefully—“unrelated to the spirit of the Games. It really runs contrary to everything the Olympics should be.”

No reporter has yet asked Gu how she feels about representing China in light of the news this week that Jimmy Lai was handed a 20-year prison sentence in Hong Kong for the crime of practicing journalism. Lai is 78 and will die in a Chinese communist prison. Gu did, however, eagerly answer questions about her custom China-themed ski suit that she designed.

Everyone is entitled to have his own views; no matter how ill-informed he may be, and no one is required to agree with every action their government takes.

But there’s a certain level of repulsiveness that comes with bashing one’s own country while on foreign soil in front of the entire world. That’s especially true for athletes who are being given the opportunity of a lifetime that is rarely afforded to others.

Contrast Hess’s groveling stupidity with the unbridled enthusiasm of Team USA wrestler Tamyra Mensah-Stock just a few short years ago at the 2021 Tokyo Summer Olympics. Wrapped in an American flag after her gold medal win, the young woman could barely contain her emotions as she expressed love for her country.

“I love representing the U.S. I freakin’ love living there. I love it. And I’m so happy I get to represent USA!” Mensah-Stock said. Notice the difference?

Whereas Mensah-Stock’s patriotism is rooted in her love of nation and gratitude for being able to compete on behalf of her fellow countrymen, athletes like Hess base their “patriotism” on who’s running America at any given moment and whether those leaders are enacting policies that align with their “moral values” (that is, their left-wing politics).

Allowing one’s love for America and its greatness to be dictated by its political leadership and government actions is flat out unpatriotic. One can disagree with the decisions of its leaders and still recognize the United States as the greatest country in the world, with an incredibly rich heritage and people.

The simplest thing any Olympian can do when asked to comment on anything political is to say something as basic as, “I’m not going to get into that. But I’m grateful to be here and for the privilege to compete on behalf of my country.”

However for Hess and Co., their worldview demands the opposite. It requires them to separate themselves from “the bad guys” in charge to prove they’re one of “the good guys” and their devotion to the “cause.”

In many ways, the Olympics are morphing into the next iteration of the Grammys or Oscars. Once-revered events devoted to celebrating the arts and recognizing meritocracy that have become platforms leftists hijack to ram their miserable, anti-American ideology down people’s throats.

U.S. athletes who use the Olympics as an avenue to thumb their noses at their home country deserve nothing but scorn and defeat. Rooting against them is not only morally just; it’s the patriotic thing to do. ✪