On a Saturday night in February 2002, I headed out of the Delta Center in Salt Lake City following the last evening of Olympic short-track speedskating. Inside the arena bowl, workers were removing all the Salt Lake 2002 signage and starting to restore the facility for NBA use. The organizers had also started cutting back on security: On my way out of the concourse, one lone guard was posted as the final remaining journalists filed out. I thanked him for his work, stepped through the door into the evening chill, and said to myself, “We did it.”
The triumph of the Salt Lake Olympics, to be fair, mostly belonged to Republicans. The George W. Bush administration had poured massive resources into securing the Games, the GOP obviously ran Utah, and Mitt Romney had taken over the local organizing committee amid scandal and earned such rave reviews that he would become my governor-elect nine months later. I was just a 25-year-old Massachusetts liberal (albeit one writing for a conservative local newspaper) who’d wrangled a press credential and spent 17 days covering the proceedings.
Yet with the September 11 attacks fresh in the memory and the ill-fated push for war in Iraq not having begun in earnest, a sense of national resolve and purpose was both real and widespread. Fears of terrorism had hovered over those Games even before 9/11 and certainly intensified after it. As corny as it sounds, it felt defiant to be in big crowds, watching sports, celebrating achievement – just as it did to hit the bars in Manhattan a few months earlier as the towers continued to smolder a couple of miles away.
I didn’t like Bush. I knew that a different ballot design, a different Supreme Court, or a different outcome in a water rescue would have kept him out of the White House, but now we were stuck with him. If nothing else, he seemed pretty good at what his father might have called “the resolve thing.” He hadn’t yet pissed away all of the post-9/11 international goodwill, his people hadn’t introduced “yellowcake from Niger” and “in the form of a mushroom cloud” into our lexicon, and neither the national press nor the Democratic establishment had torched its credibility in the service of his push for war. He was our president, and the country was still terrified, staggering from a massive psychological blow. But for two weeks along the Wasatch Front, the country hosted a successful and joyous sports festival without incident.
Yeah, we did it.
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I can’t promise a ton of message discipline here. It’s been nearly two decades since I regularly wrote columns or features prior to moving to the editing side. It may often feel like an old-school blog, full of short, insignificant items; other times, something more ambitious might escape onto the screen.
But insofar as this spot will have a theme, it’s the intersection of sports, politics, and media in modern America, entering a three-year span that will include the largest World Cup and Summer Olympics yet, the country’s 250th birthday, and (presumably) two cataclysmic election cycles.
All of it will unfold in a nation where the local news apparatus has largely collapsed, and the conglomerates that produce the national news (and pay billions to air the biggest sporting events) have spent the last year either shelling out protection money to the president, softening their coverage of him out of fear and/or fealty, or embracing their new mission as his own Waylon Smithers.
Given that the notion of “shared facts” has become as quaint as a mixtape pulled off FM radio, it’s no coincidence that the nation is also profoundly, perhaps irreparably fractured. The United States’ relationship with the athletes who represent it has always been complicated, and it will only become murkier amid such polarization and distrust. NBC will do its damnedest this month to evoke the kind of patriotic pride that fuels Olympic ratings, but if, say, 40% of the country sees Megan Rapinoe as a disgrace, yet views Klete Keller as a hero, all attempts at fostering unity are doomed.
I’ve never seen the U.S. men win Olympic gold in hockey. If you’d asked me two years ago, I’d have said that triumph would be the biggest item on my Sports Fan Bucket List, followed by the pipe dream of FIFA men’s World Cup glory. Yet when the U.S. took the ice against Canada in the 4 Nations Faceoff last winter, I couldn’t muster much excitement. When they met again in the final, I followed the game on my phone’s scoreboard app for a while, but didn’t watch. Upon learning the next morning that the U.S. lost in overtime, I mostly felt glad for the millions of Canadians who’d endured weeks of belittlement and disrespect from a president who treated their independence as a joke.
The thought of the Tkachuk brothers visiting the White House to commemorate gold in Milan is unpleasant. Same goes for the highly unlikely prospect of Christian Pulisic reprising his Trump Dance celebration on the champions’ dais at MetLife Stadium in July. The Bucket List is just one more casualty in a decade’s worth of disillusionment.
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My other major assignment as a sports reporter was the 2006 World Cup in Germany, capping seven years of soccer coverage. The sights and sounds of supporters from all over the globe inevitably charm you at a World Cup or an Olympics; yes, you know it’s a wildly corrupt money grab preying not only on people’s love of sports, but also their need to believe that gatherings like these really are good for humanity. And when you’re there, caught up in the moment, you do start to believe it.
The World Cup that awaits us, on the other hand, isn’t bothering with the charm. Trump has openly threatened to remove games from cities that refuse to bow to his whims, and FIFA President Gianni Infantino, a paragon of amorality, is mostly distracting him with shiny objects but still not dismissing the preposterous notion. Multiple qualifying nations are listed under a travel ban, an issue that would be easier to brush aside if the administration hadn’t already refused to let a Venezuelan team enter the U.S. to play in a Senior League World Series for which it had qualified. (Granted, it’s not the worst thing Trump’s done to Venezuela.) Fears of visa restrictions and excessive surveillance will surely deter foreign visitors. And regardless of citizenship status, it’s an especially perilous time to be in an American city if you have a darker complexion or an accent. Are people really going to risk harassment or brutality (or, for that matter, rendition to El Salvador) just to watch a football tournament? Oh, and the president has also threatened to absorb one co-host as the 51st state and invade the other one.
For my entire lifetime, the United States has been the surest bet when it comes to staging events like the World Cup and Olympics. But no matter how inept, corrupt, or underresourced some other host countries might be, each one of them ultimately pulls it off. Yes, these nations will inconvenience or displace many of their least fortunate residents to make it happen, and they’ll often screw over future generations by leaving enormous debt and a bunch of white elephants, but the show always goes on.
The World Cup, hosted primarily by the United States of America, is four months away. I’m not sure we’re going to pull this off.
I’m not sure they’re going to pull this off.