The Olympics are here, again, apparently. You may or may not have noticed. After all, there’s a lot of other stuff going on these days, very little of it good—and if you’re like me, this other stuff has probably been taking up most of your attention.
In the past five weeks alone, the United States has unilaterally deposed the president of Venezuela and installed a seemingly pliant figurehead in his place; threatened to wrest control of Greenland from Denmark; sent legions of masked, thuggish federal agents to occupy Minneapolis in the name of border security; attempted to obstruct probes into the deaths of two American citizens at the hands of those same masked, thuggish federal agents; seen President Donald Trump proclaim that “my own morality” is the only restraint on his executive power; and initiated risible and retaliatory federal investigations into multiple Democratic lawmakers, the chair of the Federal Reserve, and a former CNN anchor.
The U.S. government holds no monopoly on immorality. Russia continues to wage war on Ukraine. Israel continues to strike Gaza. Iran’s theocratic regime stanched a burgeoning citizen revolt by killing thousands of protesters.
Closer to home, the owner of the Washington Post, who is worth almost $250 billion, laid off more than a third of the paper’s newsroom; perhaps not coincidentally, a film studio he controls recently spent a reported $75 million to acquire and market a fawning documentary about Melania Trump. Also, the weather is trying to kill us, Catherine O’Hara died, and the goddamn Patriots are in the Super Bowl again. Everything is more or less terrible.
The Olympics are terrible too, in their own way. This point is not a novel one, but it bears repeating all the same. Every modern Olympic Games seems to end up as either an autocratic power flex or a hideously expensive boondoggle riven by cronyism and incompetence. The 2022 Beijing Games and the 2014 Sochi Games were platforms for Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin to put bright coats of paint on the truncheons that give them their power. London in 2012, Rio in 2016, Pyeongchang in 2018, and Tokyo in 2021 were all dogged by cost overruns and/or corruption scandals and/or legacies of broken promises to locals.
The shambolic Milan Cortina Games, which formally kick off with Friday’s opening ceremony, promise to be no exception. As of this week, the Italian organizers were still putting the “finishing touches” on a hockey arena that they’ve had six and a half years to build. On Wednesday, the first official event of these Olympics—curling mixed doubles, aka the Iowa caucuses of the Winter Games—was briefly interrupted by a power outage. “You will not find in these games everything you might have expected or everything we originally wanted to have,” the Milano Cortina 2026 CEO recently acknowledged—such as, you know, reliable electricity or a hockey rink that was completed before yesterday. Scusi!
Oh, and ICE is going to be there.
But while the Milan Cortina Games might have their share of problems, and might even be objectively bad, they still strike me as much less of a bad thing than all of the other bad things roiling the planet. The prospect of the world’s great powers briefly holstering their weapons to come together for a slapdash Winter Olympics isn’t necessarily comforting, but it at least feels abysmal in a relatively familiar way. We’ve all got a lot of things to worry about these days. The Olympic Games maybe don’t have to be one of those things.
Indeed, when viewed in the context of the United States’ global heel turn, you could see the Milan Cortina Games as refreshing. That’s because the Winter Olympics have never really been America’s thing. The Summer Olympics—well, now, that’s a different story. Of all the things that the U.S. does well—fast food, action movies, paternity reveals on daytime talk shows—the Summer Games might be the thing that it does best. Since 1896, when the modern Olympics got their start, Team USA has won a staggering 2,764 Summer Olympic medals—more than the second- and third-place nations combined. (Take that, the USSR and China!) The United States has been the Summer Olympic medal leader at 19 separate games. If the Olympics are a medium for great-state power projection, then the United States’ continuous dominance of the Summer Olympics tells the story of the American century.
The U.S. has not seen nearly as much success on the snow and ice. The U.S. does well enough in skiing and skating and sliding but sits only in second place in the all-time Winter Games medals count, behind Norway. More telling, perhaps, is that the U.S. has won the most medals at the Winter Olympics just once, in 1932, behind breakout performances by speedskaters Jack Shea and Irving Jaffee. Forget great power projection: Since the demise of the USSR, the Winter Olympics have been the bailiwick of lesser NATO powers such as those pesky Norwegians, plus Germany and Canada.
If the Summer Games have been a vehicle for world behemoths to assert dominance, then the Winter Games are where the other industrialized democracies go to remind the behemoths that they’re still here too. For the nations feeling squeezed between Russian militarism and American belligerence, any opportunity to assert themselves on a global stage will be relished.
Trump’s America has gone out of its way to antagonize and alienate its longtime allies in the West. It’s no mystery as to why: Trump is a narcissistic loon with a zero-sum approach to international relations. If another country has anything of value—such as, uh, Greenland—that means that Trump does not have that thing, and he just cannot fathom why something called “Denmark” should get what he wants.
There’s little point in worrying about the prospect of Olympic medals minted with Charlie Kirk’s face on them.
But as much as Trump may try, often successfully, to bully the Danes, Norwegians, and Canadians in day-to-day life, he cannot bully them off the podium at the 2026 Games. He cannot make their athletes ski slower, he cannot seize their medals, and, most important of all, he cannot stop the Olympics from happening in a country that he does not control on a continent that he disdains. (While Immigration and Customs Enforcement will be in Italy, it will reportedly have “no operational role” during the Games. Sounds nice!)
What I’m saying is that Donald Trump probably can’t ruin the Olympics—or at least he can’t ruin these Olympics. Once the 2026 Winter Games conclude, the global sporteaucracy will set its sights on the 2028 Los Angeles Games, which will be held in the final year of Trump’s second presidential term. There is every reason to think that Trump will go out of his way to ensure that those Olympics are a tacky MAGA horror show made in his own image. Like the United Nations, which recently announced it was on the brink of insolvency in large part because America refuses to pay $2.2 billion in dues, the International Olympic Committee would collapse without American money. (Though the IOC is privately funded, most of its money comes from selling Olympic broadcast rights, and most of that money comes from NBC.) What’s to stop Trump from using that money as leverage to force the IOC to play by his rules? At the very least, we can expect him to try to control the L.A. organizing committee, members of which include former Trump Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao, superagent and Ghislaine Maxwell email buddy Casey Wasserman, Quibi founder Jeffrey Katzenberg, and other very rich people who have lots to lose. Get ready for an opening ceremony featuring Kid Rock, Jon Voight, and torchbearer Riley Gaines.
But that dark day is still a couple of years away, and there’s little point in worrying about the prospect of Olympic medals minted with Charlie Kirk’s face on them. For now, there are plenty of more pressing problems for us to freak out about all day, every day. But I hope you’ll forgive me if I’m not thinking about any of that while I’m watching the luge.
Even though the Olympics never seem to live up to their own ideals, there’s something to be said for the fact that the Olympics have ideals. It’s still inspiring that athletes from every inhabited continent gather biennially in the spirit of competition, not conquest. It’s still incredibly fun to watch them square off in their respective disciplines, and to pretend from our couches that we know how to judge how well they pulled off a triple axel.
The Olympics are quaint in the best way, insofar as they are the sort of well-meaning project that people like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin would never, ever come up with on their own. They are the least terrible, still objectively bad thing we’ve got going right now. That’s something, at least.
