Last month, the NHL’s 4 Nations Face-Off tournament lent hockey the kind of jolt the sport has spent years searching for. The inaugural event’s finals, which pitted the U.S. against Canada, garnered incredible ratings, with 10.4 million viewers tuning into ESPN at one point. That made it the highest-rated hockey game ever on ESPN and the biggest non-NFL event ever on ESPN+. I had multiple friends tell me it was the first hockey game they’d watched in years.
This was the sort of cultural event that could only explode to such an extent because of outside forces, a narrative that was larger than the game itself. Those outside forces are not in short supply. The game took place amid the madness currently unfolding in the United States — specifically, President Trump’s deranged rants about making Canada the U.S.’s 51st state. Trump’s comments are the sort of dead-brained slop that Americans have (foolishly or not) mostly stopped taking seriously, but which Canadians (quite understandably) have met with unmitigated fury and righteous national pride. That Trump called the U.S. hockey team before the game added fuel to the fire, but it also confirmed the driving story line of the game: Unlike at the Miracle on Ice 45 years ago, we were the bad guys this time. Canada was David; we were Goliath.
David, a.k.a. the Canadians, triumphed. And while most American sports fans have since shifted their attention over to spring training and NFL free agency, Canadian fans are far from done using sports as a venue to express outrage at the U.S. Essentially every time the American national anthem plays at a Canadian venue, vigorous booing now follows. It happened in Montreal during the first 4 Nations matchup between the U.S. and Canada and at an MLS event in Vancouver over the weekend, and it happens at every Raptors game. During a Netflix WWE event in Toronto on Sunday night, it got so loud you could barely hear the song.
Now, soccer and hockey are one thing, but when the anthem gets booed at a rasslin’ event, you can count on America’s dumbest meatheads to get involved: “Kinda sucks that it’s in the terrible country of Canada that booed our national anthem to start this entire thing!” said ESPN’s $85 million goon Pat McAfee. Unfortunately for him, the booing is unlikely to stop anytime soon. It will likely become a regular occurrence at Toronto Blue Jays games beginning in April, and it may well become the signature story line of the upcoming Stanley Cup playoffs. It turns out that when a powerful madman challenges his neighbor and oldest ally’s sovereignty, that neighbor gets a little pissy about it.
And in the wake of the horrifying disaster in the Oval Office last week, in which Trump and Vice-President J.D. Vance berated Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and made it clear (if it wasn’t already) that America will be standing with Russia against Ukraine and no-longer-under-any-illusions European allies, I feel confident in saying that this is just the start.
If you were watching the 4 Nations Face-Off, you might have noticed the absence of one rather prominent hockey country. There are currently 66 Russian players in the NHL — more than Finland, for what it’s worth — but they weren’t a part of the event for the same reason Russia hasn’t been a part of the last few Olympics: Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. (There were only 15 Russian Olympians in Paris, all listed as “individual neutral athletes.”) The IOC is not totally on an island with this. While Russian and Belarusian athletes have been allowed to participate in international tennis tournaments since 2022 (except for one Wimbledon), they are forbidden from playing for their countries and officially compete under the banner of no nation.
So, uh, here’s the thing: If the United States is supporting Russia against Ukraine — which it sure feels like it unequivocally is — and the United States is aggressively antagonizing its traditional allies both here in North America and in Europe, well … is it our turn?
It may not be an academic question. Just last month, the Trump administration began a pressure campaign aimed at forcing the IOC to stop allowing transgender athletes to compete at international competitions, which it has permitted since 2004. That is a battle, as anyone who watched the Paris Olympics and the nonsensical right-wing backlash to it knows, that is unlikely to fizzle out anytime soon. We are only two months into the new administration and, more to the point, we are now less than a year from the Winter Olympics in Milan, Italy. Do you think the United States is going to get more in the international community’s good graces between now and then? After all, the IOC and ITF — and, really, any international athletic ruling body — is made up primarily of transatlantic allies; there aren’t many people in charge of these sports from countries who didn’t vote for the United Nations’ resolution supporting Ukraine sovereignty last week. It’s basically nations that are already banned from these organizations — and, now, us.
It’s unlikely anyone’s going to be blacking out the American flag anytime soon; we are still (for now) the most powerful country in the world and remain the linchpin — and often founder of — key international organizations. Trump has also not (yet) invaded another country, and even if he did, nobody was banning the U.S. post–Iraq War. But America’s increasingly close association with a pariah country, combined with our relentless turn against historical allies, does come with an undeniable cost. It’s not just boos and sour looks from locals when we’re on vacation in Europe, either.
Trump and his “America first” crew won’t care about sports-bureaucrat scolding. But over the next three years, the two largest sporting events on earth are coming to the United States: the World Cup next year, and the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles in 2028. While it might seem extreme to imagine the United States so isolated from the rest of the world that countries might consider not sending their athletes or teams to those events, well, think about how far the United States has fallen in the world’s estimation in just the first two months of Trump 2.0. Now imagine it a year from now, or a year and a half from now. If Russia were scheduled to host an Olympics right now — as it last did in 2014 in Sochi, which I attended, and which happened during Putin’s invasion of Crimea — do you think countries would actually go? Now think about where we’ll be this time next year, or 2026. Do you think Trump & Co. are going to work to rejoin the international community over the next 24 months? Or will they do the opposite? Even if boycotts aren’t on the table, it’s easy to imagine the World Cup and Olympics becoming political bargaining chips in all kinds of unseemly ways (a country could threaten to skip them unless Trump revokes tariffs, for instance). It’s also not hard to imagine the U.S. welcoming Russia back onto the global sports stage, as surreal as that would be. And forget about the mega-events: Anytime an American sports team travels abroad the next three years, they will likely be cast as villains.
This is the thing about isolating ourselves, about recklessly tearing down international alliances that have existed for more than 100 years: The rest of the world is, in fact, watching. Eventually, we will have to cross paths with them, whether you want to or not. The United States is turning away from the world. The world, however begrudgingly, is starting to do the same to the United States. Are we ready to be the bad guys? Like, really the bad guys? One thing is for certain: Pat McAfee better start getting used to boos.
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