“Strange. He was in a foreign country. People like it here, they don’t get booed.” Donald Trump thus dismissed the boos rained down on JD Vance at the opening ceremony of the Milan-Cortina Olympics. Perfect phrase, if the world had remained the same as it once was: America as a magnet, its flag as an emotional passport, its men as inevitable protagonists. It’s a shame that the world has changed in the meantime. And Milan pointed it out twice: first at San Siro, then at the Hockey Arena, where boos were added to the boos during the match between the US and Finnish women’s national teams. Second protest, same signal: it’s not a distraction, it’s a climate.
The point, however, is not even the protest itself. Arenas have always booed, big events are brutal mirrors, and sometimes they just reflect the mood of the crowd. The real point is that, in these hours, it is not only Italian or international spectators who are nailing the Trump administration. They are American athletes. Those who should be the “clean” face, the positive narrative, the soft power in a technical suit. And instead, in front of the cameras, someone feels the need to say out loud: don’t confuse us with what’s happening at home.
Hunter Hess, freestyle ski athlete, does so with a phrase that should ring alarm bells louder than any whistle: “Just because I wear the flag doesn’t mean it represents everything that happens in the United States.” It’s not a joke, it’s not a provocation. It is a necessary distinction, almost a self-defense. It is the admission that at this moment the flag weighs heavily, not only out of pride but also out of embarrassment. And when an athlete feels the need to separate himself from his country on the global stage of the Olympics, you’re no longer faced with a cheering episode: you’re faced with an image problem that has sunk into your bones.
Trump, of course, might tell it differently. He could say that Hess is a democracy activist disguised as a sportsman, an anti-Maga, one of the usual “enemies of the people” who dare to disagree. It’s a script we’ve already seen. But the script crumbles when cracks come from within the team. When even those who say “I love the United States” immediately add words that, for the White House, are a stab.
Chris Lillis, freestyler, gold in Beijing in 2022, brings together pride and pain in an almost surgical way. He says he loves the United States and “would never want to represent” any other country at the Games. However, he admits that he is “heartbroken”, answering a question about how he feels about what is happening in America: “Many times athletes are reluctant to talk about political opinions, but I feel destroyed by what is happening in the USA. If you’re talking about ICE, I think as a country we should focus on respecting everyone’s rights and making sure we treat our citizens as well as anyone else, with love and respect.” And then he adds: “I hope that when people watch athletes compete in the Olympics, they understand that this is the America we are trying to represent.”
These are not slogan phrases. These are phrases from someone who is trying to save a collective identity while politics drags them into a permanent culture war. The message is clear: there is an America that they want to represent, and it does not coincide with the America that the European public perceives when they see certain choices and certain symbols.
That the situation is serious can also be understood from a detail that usually goes unnoticed: even a conservative newspaper like the Wall Street Journal, which is not exactly a progressive poetry club, records the data and puts it on the front page with a headline that sounds like a report: “Team USA and Vance booed in a cold reception at the Italian Winter Olympics”.
And the importance of the signal is underlined in the story, with a passage that hurts because it doesn’t need dramatic adjectives: «Italy has opened its arms to welcome the whole world. Well, almost the whole world. In a clear sign of how America’s vision in Europe is rapidly becoming blurred, the US delegation entered the San Siro stadium to a chorus of boos and disapproval from the international crowd of more than 65,000. The mockery increased when Vance appeared on the big screen during Team USA’s arrival. The only other team to receive similar treatment was Israel.”
Here Trump tries to get away with saying that Vance is “liked at home”. But the point, once again, is another: it’s not the domestic approval rating, it’s the effect abroad. It’s not a question of elections, it’s a question of global reputation. And if even athletes, those who should stay away from politics to protect their careers and sponsors, start speaking “regardless of the possible consequences”, it means that internal pressure has become stronger than fear.
Mikaela Shiffrin does it with a different, higher, almost programmatic register, also quoting Mandela: “I am here at the Games to represent my values. I believe in the importance of kindness, diversity and sharing. There are great difficulties, heartbreak and violence in the world and in the United States, it is not easy to reconcile all this with sporting competitions but we must do it, without ever stopping to say how we think. I hope that the Olympics are a great sporting and sharing spectacle”. It is a measured stance, but for this very reason it is effective: he does not shout, he does not attack, he does not propagandize. He says: I can’t pretend that the context doesn’t exist.
Then there is Amber Glenn, who talks about another level of the problem, that of threats and targeted hatred: “I am the victim of an enormous amount of hatred and harsh warnings, just for having said what I think. But it is necessary to remain strong: I am not scared and I will never stop using my voice to reiterate what I believe in, I feel it as a duty. Sometimes they advise me to think only about sport and leave politics alone, and I reply that politics concerns everyone and affects everyone. Including that of a president like Donald Trump. It is right that we know that many, very many of us do not think like him.” Here there is no longer even the theme of the flag: there is the theme of the price to pay for existing in public.
And when Trump replies about Hess with the spiked club, the scene becomes almost didactic: “American Olympic skier Hunter Hess, a real loser, claims not to represent his country in the current Winter Olympics,” he attacks. “If that’s the case he shouldn’t even have applied for the team, it’s a shame he’s part of it. It’s really hard to root for a person like that.” It’s an answer that doesn’t try to understand, it tries to crush. It’s not foreign policy: it’s managing dissent as a personal insult. And every time you do it, worldwide, the reputational damage multiplies.
The most grotesque case, and perhaps for this reason the most revealing, is that of Gus Kenworthy, American by birth but competing for Great Britain, who chooses unprecedented “eloquence” by writing “Fuck Ice” in the snow with pee. Vulgar, sure. But sport, when politics enters the field, also becomes this: extreme symbols, extreme gestures, extreme reactions. Because if you don’t feel you have normal spaces to say things, you end up shouting them.
And now comes the second front, the one that the White House is really interested in: the global spectacle outside the Olympics, the Super Bowl, the most viewed and richest showcase. If at the Olympics America is contested in Europe, at the halftime show the risk is that the fracture becomes domestic, in front of its own audience. Trump repeats that thanks to him the United States has become the “hottest” country in the world. Milan, with its cold not only meteorological, responded that perhaps this is not exactly the case.
The heaviest part of this whole story is that it doesn’t concern a race, a whistle, a video. It’s about soft power, what America has always used as a silent weapon: to be desired, to be imitated, to be told as a promise. If today allies bend just because the US is powerful and rich and Trump is unpredictable, then it is no longer attraction: it is fear. And fear doesn’t create consensus, it creates resentment. What at San Siro and at the Hockey Arena became a sound, and which in the mouths of the athletes became a phrase: “We are not this. We don’t want to be just this”.
The question now isn’t whether Vance is popular at home. The question is whether in Washington they have understood that America, outside, is no longer applauded out of inertia. And that, when even those who represent it with a medal on their chest feel the need to distance themselves, the problem is not Milan. It is the image of a country that is fading away just when it thinks it shines brightest.
date: 2026-02-08 17:33:00