What did you root for, this time around? Did you save a breath, this year, for the final quarter turn of skis and skates still in the air, instead of fixating on the deduction for the landing? Did you cheer on behalf of the toddlers who watched uncomprehendingly as their mothers sped along the last laps of the long track or down the walls in the monobob? Did you shout back, in spite of yourself, the cries of whoa and curl—or ziehen and järnet and linea buona—from your own curled-up corner of the couch?
What did you find “very hard to root for”—to take up the unpresidential presidential phrase, directed at American freestyle skier Hunter Hess? The traditional round of Olympic scandals this winter was sufficiently complicated and piecemeal as to diffuse or redirect immediate outrage. Did the male Norwegian ski jumpers really undergo hyaluronic acid injections to enhance their competitive length—and how many inches did they get? Was the principal crime of the French ice-dancing duo that they dismissed abuse by a former partner, took teammates’ spots with a last-minute passport change, or received a suspicious gold-medal score from a compatriot judge? And were we all really convinced that a double-touch to the granite after the hog line constituted a material advantage—in a pub game of a sport we were only just starting to understand—or was it just the uncharacteristic “fuck off” from the accused Canadians that seemed especially unsportsmanlike?
Least surprising, in any case, and most unifying in its provocation of disgust, was that Kirsty Coventry wasted less than a year as the International Olympic Committee’s new president before making herself a heel. When the IOC Disciplinary Commission disqualified Ukrainian skeleton racer Vladyslav Heraskevych for commemorating on his helmet the smiling faces of fallen friends and teammates, victims of the war with the countries Olympically known as the Athlètes Individuels Neutres, it put Coventry in the position of finding a creative compromise—or rather, forcing Heraskevych to compromise. When the racer held fast and received his DQ, jeers fell on the Olympic Committee and cheers on the remaining Ukrainian lugers, who knelt in unison to raise a sardonic symbol of defiance: undecorated white helmets, now no longer neutral.
In the face of all this, the press comments made by Hess on what it means to wear the flag in 2026 should hardly have provoked Trump’s outburst (one of his only reactions to the Games) or made international news. To say that “it brings up mixed emotions to represent the US right now,” and that “there’s obviously a lot going that I’m not the biggest fan of” is, at worst, an ambiguous objection. To hear it as an attack on your administration is telling on yourself. And to then brand one of your own athletes “a real Loser” is to guarantee that the rest of the world would wish him a winner.
The presumption that the world follows American athletes in particular at anything like the level that NBC coverage suggests is its own breed of bias. But as the NBA All-Star ads reminded us throughout the first Olympic week, we have committed as a country to the format of “USA vs. World.” And that’s why I wonder, stateside, about your rooting and your cheering. Did it not feel a little much, after months of belittling the courage of North Atlantic co-combatants in Afghanistan, bullying allies into territorial buyouts in the Arctic, bombing boats in the open water of the Caribbean, building up an invasion force in the Arabian Sea, and officially recommitting the energy sector to boiling the oceans altogether, to also ask the international crowd to stand twelve times for the blaring of the Star-Spangled Banner?
And still, we would root for Hess to hear it. And for those who made louder criticisms, like Minnesotans Rich Ruohonen and Kelly Pannek (against ICE), California snowboarder Chloe Kim (for immigrants and free speech), or Texas figure skater Amber Glenn (for LGBTQ rights). And for those who just came to compete: the whole delegation of 232 athletes trying to earn their 32 measures of anthem in 3/4 time.
Against the background of what we might call the Russification of the US state—reaffirmed in the aftermath of Milano Cortina 2026 when, in a dissonant echo of Beijing 2022 (or Sochi 2014, for that matter), the Olympic Truce gave way again to immediate war—some of us were watching to see if Team USA was Russified as well. The enduring image from four years ago is that of three young skaters from the “Russian Olympic Committee” broken even in their moment of victory: 15-year-old Kamila Valieva faltering under the shadow of a new doping accusation, with teammates Alexandra Trusova and Anna Sherbakova taking her place joylessly on the podium, each bullied to tears or silence by coach Eteri Tutberidze. This year, one image could have cast a similar pall: That of a drunk FBI director and the US men’s hockey team laughing at a sexist joke, told over the phone by the sitting president, raucously dismissing the equal achievement of national teammates in the same sport. But that image of complicit conformity was the anomaly. Per the small declarations of independence spoken by a few freestyle skiers, Team USA turned out to be a team of individuals. These were flagbearers of all stripes.
On foreign broadcast networks, the team as a whole must be a compelling antagonist. Even in the best of diplomatic eras, the US Olympic squad comes off as the preppy rich villain at the small-town slope, with its enormous delegation of coaches, its cavalcade of traveling fans, its Ralph Lauren jackets, its ubiquitous flag and three-beat chant. This was apparent all the way back in 1896, at the very first Olympics in Athens, when we only had forty-five stars on the banner and only sent fourteen competitors overseas. Even then, the protofascist French spectator Charles Maurras, otherwise delighted to see the international Olympic experiment feeding the flames of jingoism, singled us out with distaste as the “loudest nationalists in the stadium” and the ones lacking any sense of civility. “Arriving in droves, the Yankees appear three times more numerous than they actually are: every time a victory is proclaimed; the flag of their Union slaps in the wind; the hats and caps take flight; the fanfare shakes the wooden bleachers.”
In 2026 it seemed a curse was due, a plague from ancient Greece. The feeling of tragic fate was heavy in the first week. After the hubris of posting a video of squats and box jumps on an ACL torn one week prior, or calling oneself “Quad God” and “Blade Angel” while still at the foot of Olympus, the peripeteia ensued: a horrifying crash 13 seconds into Lindsey Vonn’s downhill run, followed by screams for a leg shattered and an airlift ex machina; a loss of nerve for Ilia Malinin in the free skate, the echo of his own Socratic spoken-word recording declaring that “the only true wisdom is knowing you know nothing”; an invalid final jump in the short program for Glenn, and then the disfiguring tears, the mask of Melpomene.
It wouldn’t work out for Hess, either. He flashed a jocular L on his forehead after nailing his qualifying run, but then admitted in interviews that the backlash had gotten to him and that these had been the hardest weeks of his life. In the final contest of the freestyle halfpipe, he crashed in his first two attempts and couldn’t put his biggest jumps together in the final run. He finished in tenth place.
But that wasn’t the end of the story for the freestyle skiers. There were still the mixed team aerials, whose Chris Lillis had made far more pointed comments at the pre-Olympic press table, singling out ICE and enumerating the principles of rights, love, and respect that he took to be the values of the uniform: “I hope that when people look at athletes competing in the Olympics, they realize that that’s the America that we’re trying to represent.” This, too, somehow, brought out the pitchforks on social media, and Lills responded by stoking the flames, offering a video of one of his crashes during a practice run as a gift for his “haters.” Chris and his mixed team trio each suffered disappointments in their individual events, but on the penultimate day of competition they rose back as a unit. To the roar of the crowd and the jubilation of the announcers, Lillis’s quadruple twist sealed the win.
These second winds and second acts, especially in the second week, changed the entire arc of Team USA’s story. After Vonn’s chilling crash—one that almost cost her a leg—she continued to share the day-by-day story of her recovery with “no regrets,” owning the risk she had taken and the “incredibly dangerous sport” she loves. Her comeback was over, but it was not all downhill on the downhill for her or her teammates: Mikaela Shiffrin, returning from her own three crashes in 2022 and the PTSD that followed, took a moment of quiet at the end of a victorious slalom run and a moment of joy on the podium. Over at the rink, after Malinin froze up and fell during his historic attempt at seven quads, the crowd rallied to cheer him through his final leap, the first-ever legalized Olympic backflip in solo competition. And for Glenn, there was double redemption in the form of a season-best score in the free skate and a standout performance in the Exhibition Gala. Lady Gaga’s cover of “That’s Life,” picked out long before the Games, visibly meant more now to the skater who had a few days prior picked herself up to get back in the race. It was Glenn’s own star quality in the spotlight—culminating in a triumphal backbending arch across the ice—that put her back on top.
Most important, though, in any redemption story, are the third acts: what the Americans did in the moments after their defeats and their victories. Malinin embraced Kazakh victor Mikhail Shaidorov, cradled his head, and repeated, against the Kazakh’s disbelieving protestations, “You deserve it.” Glenn shielded the tears of Japanese skater Kaori Sakamoto after a costly mistake and waved away the cameras, in shared understanding of the pressure and the pain. Elsewhere, Kim beamed in delight for Korean snowboarder Choi Ga-on, a former fan who had beaten her in the halfpipe, and the US women curlers (unlike the Canadian men) owned up to an infraction, coming to an informal agreement with their Italian rival. Team USA’s legacy at these Games is not that they scrapped their way back to 33 medals, but that they earned half of all the nominations for the Fair Play Award and that Malinin was ultimately the one to win it. That’s how you undo a curse and earn back the cheers.
One more set of comments during the pre-Olympic freestyle skiing presser, immediately after the highly publicized statements from Lillis and Hess, changed the way I watched these Games. For the siblings Birk and Svea Irving—grandchildren of the novelist John Irving—the question was not how to represent the whole of a fractured country in 2026, but how to show up for the specific community that had gotten them to Milan: their hometown of Winter Park, Colorado.
As the televised title cards and scorecards suggest, coverage of the Olympics has always recognized the human interest of the athletes’ hometowns. But in the last two years, since Paris 2024, NBC and its local affiliates have started putting together a more coordinated television and news package on “Hometown Hopefuls,” a platform athletes seized in 2026 to say more about the particular communities and causes they represent. Take cross-country skier Gus Schumacher of Anchorage, Alaska, whose alarm at practicing on shrinking glaciers sent him on a mission to Washington in 2022 as part of the Athlete Alliance to “Protect Our Winters.” Or Paralympic Nordic skier and PhD student Sydney Peterson, who studies neurogenerative diseases at the University of Utah. And there is Glenn, who came out in the Dallas Voice and has made special note of the different sets of stripes flying at her events, red and white and rainbow: “I saw them, and I was proud to see both of those flags flying.”
All of this helps to answer the question that Hess was wrestling with: What does it mean to wear that American flag—flying backward, as it happens, on the right sleeve, as if blown back in the icy wind of winter competition—on Team USA’s Olympic jacket? Amid a parade of nations, or in the corner graphic of a qualifying heat, our flag always looks like it’s trying to do too much. Compared to the basic triple bars, Nordic crosses, and large emblems of the other banners, the American design is overloaded with a level of detail that strains even a 4K screen. Too many stripes, too many stars, too close together. But then that is the point: that you have to look closely, to decide where on the grid you plot your own coordinates. Each Olympian wears the whole of the flag, but as individual stars they are individual stars.
From the opening marches to the tally of the medal board, the Olympics are scaled to the dimensions of the nation, but they need not be. The Games are hosted, after all, not by countries but by individual cities, and while international coverage tends to conflate the two, the culture of one is not the same as the other. The freshly lingering memories of Paris 2024, with the urbane provocations of its Opening Ceremony and the site-specific artistry of its sports, impresses this upon us. The compound “Milano Cortina” Games were an experiment of increasing granularity, as simultaneous ceremonies took place in the cosmopolitan capital of Lombardy and the picturesque Alpine winter village, dividing up the parade of athletes by sport as much as by nation.
The artistic program itself made early efforts to emphasize northern Italian heritage, with tributes to the sculptor Antonio Canova (from Possagno), the Accademia del Teatro alla Scala (from Milan), and even Bialetti coffee makers (from Piedmont). That focus fell apart quickly when Armani dressed models in the colors of the Italian flag and Sabrina Impacciatore jumped into animated AI slush commemorating one hundred years of the Winter Olympics. Her subsequent dance segment announced the typical turn in these stage shows, from local and national culture to global pop, by kicking off with “Prisencolinensinainciusol,” a novelty track from 1973 made up of gibberish American phonemes. But even so, it’s worth remembering that the rock star responsible for the joke, Adriano Celentano, was himself Milanese. In any case, tenor Andrea Bocelli singing “Vincerò!” (“I will win!”) offered a more dignified rendition of the Italian Olympic theme, and the beautiful Closing Ceremonies at the two-thousand-year-old Arena of Verona suggested a return from the international Tower of Babel back to local turf.
For Games taking pride in their “widespread” regional venues, the lack of any recognition of the more particular heritage of the Alpine north was a missed opportunity. We sat through an extended self-parody of the language of Italian hand-gestures, but there was no mention of the dozen languages that come before Italian to the inhabitants of the Dolomites. The mother and majority tongue of Cortina is Ladin, which has eight words for snow; surely there was something to use here. But when seventeen mayors of Ladin towns asked Olympic organizers what cultural representation they could contribute, they were met with silence. Ultimately, there were a couple local competitors for Team Italy, including a Ladin slalom skier from Bolzano and Stefania Constantini, the curling champion from Cortina, a few citizens in traditional dress to be spotted in the torch relay and the parade, and that was it. The locals took it upon themselves to welcome tourists with dictionaries, videos, and their own regional flag: a tricolor of blue, white, and green, in honor of the local landscape.
If we want to recenter our Olympic rings on the city scale, then there is another interlocking site that counts: beyond where the events are set, and where the athletes come from, there is also the matter of where you, the spectator, are watching. Some of the best footage of every Olympic season is from the local bar in Wisconsin or Missouri or Massachusetts, revealing the special investment of fans in a sport that has overtaken one particular town, thanks to one particular neighbor.
Watching from San Francisco or from Stanford, as I was, there was a presumptive champion to root for, but also a notoriously complicated one. Eileen Gu, the triple threat women’s freestyle skiing medalist, grew up in Sea Cliff, with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge, trained in Tahoe in the winter, and lived in Beijing in the summer. She studies international relations under the shadow of Hoover Tower and competes for the People’s Republic of China. She made $23 million last year as a brand ambassador—and, as was revealed during this year’s Games, as a recruit for the Beijing Municipal Sports Bureau, too. After the Olympics, she stuck around in Milan for her “other job” at Fashion Week. Then it was back home to lead San Francisco’s Chinese New Year parade, a grand marshal in a Ford Mustang.
To the question of whom, or what, Gu represented at Livigno, there are myriad answers: Louis Vuitton and Tiffany, Red Bull and Porsche, the Bay and Beijing, the Cardinal and the Red. Gu herself speaks of representing her sport first and foremost, and of escaping from the weight of everything else for the thirty seconds of the halfpipe. She also posted about how the Games themselves are her “Homecoming,” and it does seem plausible that the cosmopolitan Olympic Village is the rare ephemeral city where she might find her only peers and compatriots. But it was apparent, in the end—on her final gold-medal run, in her bespoke Anta blue-and-white ski suit, spinning like an indestructible flying porcelain vase—that she stands above all for herself. That will continue to divide her fans and her critics, particularly in the US and the Silicon Valley, but it’s the champion that they each deserve: an arch-individualist out for all she can win, especially if that’s a multinational brand.
And yet the Bay also got something more: it got Alysa Liu. Her story, like her routines, combined all the best elements of what her fellow Olympians exhibited: an improbable comeback, a found voice, kindness to competitors, and overflowing hometown pride. She was the child prodigy weighted with expectation who had withdrawn into an early retirement; the young woman who was back for her own reasons, on her own terms, outspoken and plainspoken; the competitor whose first reaction to winning was to bear-hug her 17-year-old Japanese rival; the irrepressible, rebellious, joyful, contrarian athletic ambassador of the East Bay, shouting out her roots and getting a shout-out from Marshawn Lynch in return. She was here, in her words, to “bring Oakland to Milan.” And if that combination called for a free skate of overtly mismatched countercultural flair and arena-diva energy—the bleached raccoon stripes and the self-administered smiley piercing, the rhinestone spangles and Donna Summer’s disco cover of “MacArthur Park”—it all worked so long as she was flaunting the fun of it. All of those eclectic pieces, after all, perfectly matched her bite into a glittering gold medal at the end.
So chalk one up for the Golden State: It’s with California that I want to close. The Olympics are after all coming here next. As is the way with the ever-renewing hex of the ancient Greek calendar, the Olympiad of the Summer Games always falls in an American election year, and after the redistricting wars and the ICE raids and the battles over wildfire relief, we’re going to feel more than ever the friction in the flag where the stitches pull at the thirty-first star.
It will be tempting to sew things up the way Armani did: to let the march of the state dictate the colors of the city. But what the hosts can learn from this year’s hometown hopefuls, and what the residents of LA can learn from the Ladins, is that national identity can be refashioned at the local level. This is all the more apparent in the home of Hollywood, where for a century a border-town cosmopolis of coastal eccentrics has alchemized Americana in sunbaked studio lots and suburban backlots. It’s going to be up to the directors of the city ceremony and national revue to decide what kind of political theater is staged when the torch arrives for the third time at Memorial Coliseum. The key will be to take the show back out through the arches to the hills, the beaches, and the boulevards where an American parade of nations already walks and drives on the daily.
The liturgy of the Opening Ceremonies will require, about a half hour in, the ritual of raising the stars and stripes and the five rings. But each new host puts its own stamp on the old standard, and LA should fly its dancetty zig zags first: the loud, wacky, green-yellow-and-red “Fiesta Flag” adopted as the city banner the year before the first LA Olympics in 1932, with its own overcrowded seal divided four ways between the US, California, Mexico, and (why not) the Kingdom of Castile. That is a different model of union and scale of representation, one strangely befitting the Olympics. Be the cosmopolitan home appropriate to a national ambassador and an international host. Be the City of Angels and Lincoln’s better angels too.
It is a precept of our own regional jingoism, here in the Bay, to sneer at everything that is hot, flat, and overproduced about Los Angeles and its aesthetics. When we deign to visit, we are the ones—as Eve Babitz catalogues in her letter of defense, “My God, Eve, How Can You Live Here?”—who deride the architecture, the freeways, “the false fronts, the pancake makeup, the sequins of your regrettable sister who’s gone on the stage and captured everyone but you.” It’s a second precept, when it comes to sports, that we can’t wish our southern intrastate rivals anything but hurt. We roll our eyes at the movie tie-ins for your mascots, at your court of Showtime stars, at the relentless Trojan fanfares after every three-yard gain, at the back-to-back pennants you just bought. But in two years, we’re going to make an exception, and we’re going to stand for your flag. We’re going to learn to see, to love, and to cheer for—as Babitz continues—that “simple determination to sprawl indifferently into the sunset.” LA, I’m rooting for you.
