Of course, it wasn’t just Malinin whose performance tugged my attention away from Italy and toward America. A handful of athletes from the States have spoken up, less in righteous indignation than in baffled concern, about American politics these days. The curler Rich Ruohonen—who, when he’s not winning tournaments, works as a personal-injury lawyer—spoke at a press conference about ICE’s outrageous behavior in Minneapolis. “I’m proud to be here to represent Team U.S.A., and to represent our country,” he said. “But we’d be remiss if we didn’t at least mention what’s going on in Minnesota and what a tough time it’s been for everybody. This stuff is going on right around where we live.” Looking like he might cry, he stopped to issue a few jagged breaths before he went on. “I am a lawyer,” he said, “and we do have—we have a constitution, and it allows us freedom of the press, freedom of speech, protects us from unreasonable searches and seizures, and makes it that we have to have probable cause to be pulled over. And what’s happening in Minnesota is wrong.”
It was a startling thing, this impromptu civics lesson, offered in the middle of an international sporting occasion. The Olympic organizers have gone to great and sometimes absurd pains to excise political messaging from the Games. The Haitian team was made to remove an image of Toussaint Louverture from its uniforms, which reproduced a portrait by the celebrated artist Edouard Duval-Carrié. The eighteenth-century revolutionary’s horse remained, riderless, backgrounded by bright-green leaves and a tangy blue sky. The Ukrainian skeleton racer Vladyslav Heraskevych was disqualified from his event for wearing a black-and-white helmet depicting athletes killed in Russia’s war of aggression against his homeland.
But the Americans couldn’t totally suppress their sour mood. Hunter Hess, a skier, made a useful distinction between the flag stitched onto his clothes and the vision of his country that lives in his heart and mind. “Just because I wear the flag doesn’t mean I represent everything that’s going on in the U.S.,” he said. Donald Trump responded on Truth Social: “U.S. Olympic Skier, Hunter Hess, a real Loser, says he doesn’t represent his Country in the current Winter Olympics. If that’s the case, he shouldn’t have tried out for the Team, and it’s too bad he’s on it.”
As if attempting to display all this tumult on the slopes, the forty-one-year-old skier Lindsey Vonn crashed violently after her pole hooked a gate during the women’s downhill race. Only nine days prior, she’d torn her A.C.L. The pride it had taken to race anyway felt like an echo—or a symptom—of the national character. Her legs bent horribly, as if in flight, one from the other. Even over the broadcast, you could hear her howl.
Sometimes the national angle on the proceedings had a happier slant. Take the case of Francesca Lollobrigida, the thirty-five-year-old Italian speed skater who won gold in the women’s three-thousand-metre and five-thousand-metre races. In the three thousand, you could see the home-town crowd—its delight at her presence, its hope for her victory—urging her forward in the final third of the race. She’d started out aggressively, and it seemed like her energy should have been about to wane. Instead, she surged. After she won, she searched the crowd for her cute young son, Tommaso. She’d done it for him, for the nation.
Winter sports appear to flow naturally from the landscapes that act as their settings. The existence of a steep slope, lost in powder, seems to cry out for a reckless ski jump or a series of ramp-enhanced snowboard tricks. Hockey and speed skating and figure skating all point to the reality of the pond—frozen over, sturdy enough to hold a human body. Even the bobsled, that vehicle for the death wishes of puppyish youths, has a kind of intuitive connection to the fear and the thrill we feel while gliding or slipping on the ice. Cross-country skiers, heaving and snotting, look like packs of unusually fit travellers, perhaps chasing down a warm meal to curb the fatal chill of a long winter.
