AT THE MILAN CORTINA 2026 Winter Olympics, competing under the American banner has put some athletes at odds with their own government, transforming them — in a handful of candid remarks — from cereal-box patriots into political liabilities swiftly pilloried by the conservative establishment.

When reporters asked American freestyle skier Hunter Hess how it felt to wear the U.S. flag in front of the world in this moment, he said it “brings up mixed emotions.” Hess drew a clear line between the country he competes for and the policies coming out of Washington, saying, “Just because I’m wearing the flag doesn’t mean I represent everything that’s going on in the U.S.”

Hess wasn’t alone in speaking out. Curler Rich Ruohonen, an attorney and Minnesota native, criticized recent federal law enforcement actions in the state, saying the operations were “wrong” and violated Americans’ constitutional rights. Snowboarder Chloe Kim, whose parents immigrated to the United States from South Korea, defended her fellow teammates, saying Trump’s immigration policies “hit pretty close to home” and that athletes are “allowed to voice” their opinions.

Conservative commentators also charged in on behalf of the administration. After U.S. figure skater Amber Glenn, who won gold in the team event, voiced support for her LGBTQ community, conservative podcaster and former Fox News host Megyn Kelly branded her “another turncoat to root against” to her 3.6 million followers. The outrage snowballed, and Glenn said she received a “scary amount of hate/threats,” prompting her to take a break from social media altogether. (She later returned to TikTok with a carousel of images of her and teammate Alysa Liu wearing their team gold medals and addressing her critics: “They hate to see two woke bitches winning.”)

As the Olympics entered the broadcast era and the audience stretched far beyond the stadium, political leaders were acutely aware they could use the Games’ reach to bolster their legitimacy. By the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Adolf Hitler and his propagandists transformed the Games into a showcase for the Nazi regime’s image and ideology. The widely publicized spectacle of a nation unified under Nazism was engineered to sanitize the Third Reich at home and abroad, cementing the modern Olympics as a global platform for state propaganda — and, inevitably, for those willing to resist it. Jewish organizations, labor leaders, and civil rights groups in the United States and Europe tried to organize a boycott of the event, warning that participation would validate Hitler’s regime and its persecution of Jews, but the effort ultimately failed. Athletes responded with the most direct act of resistance available to them: by winning, in open defiance. Jesse Owens — an African American runner — shattered Hitler’s carefully staged narrative of “Aryan” superiority by winning four gold medals, turning his victories into a de facto rebuke of the regime’s racial ideology.

Decades later, the 1968 Mexico City Games delivered one of the clearest political statements in Olympic history: sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising black-gloved fists on the medal stand in protest of racial injustice in the United States — an enduring image that turned the podium into a site of public dissent in front of the world.