Winter Olympics

“The son of Kronos spoke, and bowed his dark brow, and immortal locks fell forward from the lord’s deathless head, and he made great Olympus tremble.” —Homer, the Iliad. The only sporting event that I always watch and excitedly look forward to is the Winter Olympics. It’s simultaneously a terrific and lousy escape from politics and the news. On the one hand, the fairytale of the Olympics is beautiful: a good-natured competition between athletes from all countries who are each afforded respect for their talents, irrespective of the politics of their countries. On the other hand, however, the Olympics are of course inherently political. Not only because it is, after all, not just a competition between people but between nations, but also because the Olympic Committee decides what countries can participate and where the events are held. Not to mention that it also decides which athletes can compete, and what sports regulations to use from which governing bodies. When the contemporary Olympics started, organized entirely by men, the exclusion of women became a struggle for the feminist movement. More recently, the fight has been about the inclusion of transgender athletes. I’ve written about both of these topics in chapter 3 of my article “Sexy Science.” This is the first Winter Olympics to include a trans athlete. Confusingly for Fox News, skier Elis Lundholm is a trans man. Because he has not undergone hormone replacement therapy, Lundholm is competing in the women’s category. This would ostensibly be what conservatives want: athletes competing according to the gender assigned to them at birth. Unless of course that is merely a thin smokescreen designed to obfuscate an even more unsavory agenda, manufacturing outrage about “men” exploiting women’s sports as a subtle delivery system for a broader media campaign to dehumanize trans people. Feeding transphobia to your gormless audience, just like you’d give a pill to a dog by wrapping it in bacon. The existence of trans men was apparently deemed too complicated for the Fox News audience, so the network only published one article about Lundholm that mostly stuck to dry facts, lightly condescended him about his gender, and grumbled that “under the current framework, transgender athletes can compete in the Olympics after being cleared by their respective sports federations. … a new policy has yet to be officially announced … to coincide with President Donald Trump’s ‘Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports’ executive order.” The funniest part is reading the comments underneath the article. One confused transphobe wrote, “Men in women’s sports! Who would have ever thought this could even happen other than being a joke. Stop the nonsense!” What a way to accidentally “woke” yourself into a corner. As per usual, the actual athletes themselves have no problem with including a transgender peer in their sport. “I think it’s great that Elis is competing as the, I think, first transgender Winter Olympian,” said fellow skier Tess Johnson. “I think that’s awesome.” Nevertheless, the assault on trans rights continues along with the moral panic about trans athletes. Worryingly, the Olympic Committee has signaled it might ban trans athletes in the future, which would undo the feminist movement’s hard-won victories and regress back into the days when panels of men policed womanhood with predictable consequences. (Again, Chapter 3: “Sports.”) There is another unavoidable political splinter in the romantic frozen fairytale of the Olympic games this year. Contradicting the rhetoric of inclusion, athletes from Belarus and Russia were not allowed to compete under their own flag. Only twenty athletes were given the status of AIN, which stands for Athlètes Individuels Neutres  (Individual Neutral Athlete). In a departure from previous years, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) forbade them from competing under the Olympic flag and having the official Olympic anthem played during ceremonies; instead they were assigned a teal-colored banner and were barred from marching in the opening ceremony’s Parade of Nations. Furthermore, since these are all individual competitors, Russian and Belarusian athletes were simply banned from team sports altogether. The official reasoning used by the IOC is that this is punishment for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Minsk’s support thereof. Unofficially, their decision was likely influenced after Western states threatened in 2023 to boycott the 2024 Paris Olympics if Russian and Belarusian athletes were allowed to compete. This highlights how nation states use sporting events as glass display cases for their soft power. When the IOC decided ban Russia from competing, and announced that individual Russian athletes could compete under the neutral AIN flag—basing that decision on the Olympic Charter and UN resolutions against international discrimination—Norway’s minister of culture still criticized the move as “provocative” for not going far enough. “Neutrality is not possible,” she said. “Any sports performance is pure propaganda.” The West’s logic, also evident from their punitive sanctions on the Russian economy (i.e. on Russian workers), is that all Russian people are to blame for Moscow’s war. At the same time, however, the West insists, in my view correctly, that Russia is not a democracy and that Putin is an authoritarian leader. How, then, could they conceivably justify punishing all Russian citizens? The legalese employed by the IOC is that Russia has occupied Ukrainian sports centers, which violates the Olympic Charter. Therefore, the Russian state is disqualified from participating in the games. But Israeli athletes are participating under their own flag, despite having razed 265 sports facilities in Gaza and killed at least 1,007 Palestinian athletes, according to the Palestinian Olympic Committee. Although I suppose that doesn’t qualify as “occupying” these sports centers, even though they are in the occupied territories. What does unequivocally count is the IDF’s occupation of Yarmouk Stadium in Gaza City since December 24, 2023. Now no longer used by Palestinians to play soccer, the Israelis have turned it into an internment camp where they torture Palestinian civilians. Yet Israel is still allowed to compete under their own colors, with their own anthem, unencumbered by the September 2025 UN report that found Israel is committing genocide. Likewise, the United States is not banned. Nor have they ever been banned or otherwise punished, even when they invaded Vietnam; or when the International Court of Justice found they were committing war crimes in Nicaragua; nor when they invaded Iraq (twice), and Afghanistan. I don’t necessarily think they should be banned. A country is more than a government, and the people, athletes included, shouldn’t be held responsible for the crimes of their government. If that argument would work at all, it would only work in functioning democracies. So if we accept the popular view that the United States is a democracy, then that strengthens the argument to ban its citizens from competing at the Olympics as punishment for their state’s crimes. (And still I would argue against such a ban.) Although, I believe the American people have about as much influence over their government as the Russian people have over the Kremlin—that is to say, not much at all. Nevertheless, if the US flag is allowed to be hoisted on the international stage accompanied by the “Star-Spangled Banner” if their athletes win gold medals—ditto for the Israelis—then so should the Russian athletes be allowed that same courtesy. Or, perhaps an even better idea, let’s dispense with the nationalism all together and have all athletes compete as individuals; no flag-colored uniforms and no national anthem. Perhaps then the quixotic Olympian story would be slightly more convincing, and the games could become a better escape of pure athletic competition without the real world inserting its political conflicts onto the podium.