A Little Joy, A Little Sadness, And A Gold Medal

Today's Bad Faith Times blog was written by Jeff Hicks, a BFT supporter and an avid sports fan. You can follow Jeff on Bluesky – the official app of sports – at @otherjeffhicks.bsky.social.

I didn’t expect to have a mental health crisis after Team USA won the gold medal in men’s ice hockey.

I watched the men’s hockey gold medal game between the United States and Canada, and like most Americans I wanted to see the red, white, and blue claim the gold for the first time in a (very) long time. For anyone born after 1980, it would be the first and maybe only time to witness such a feat. 

Then Jack Hughes scored the golden goal and it was over. The American men, like the American women's hockey team, had done it.

I cried. A lot. Aside from the awesome tribute to Johnny Gaudreau, who would have been on this team if it weren’t for a drunk driver killing him and his brother on a bike ride, I had no idea why I was so emotional, why I couldn’t stop crying. The tears didn't stop for a few minutes. They flowed and flowed.

There had been plenty leading up to my gold medal game outburst that could have been the culprit: The highs and lows of raising kids, my overwhelming job, and a society in the grips of acute constitutional crisis, hanging on by a thread while the president’s personal paramilitary kidnaps and kills anyone that gets in the way of his agenda. 

I wouldn’t have a foundational love of sports without my dad. Baseball and hockey were the sports he enjoyed the most, and I wanted to be like dad. So we watched together. A lot.

Baseball was easy to enjoy and to play. In Illinois, where I grew up, leagues were plentiful when baseball was in-season. It was also an accessible sport considering we had to mind our dollars and cents in those days. 

Hockey was the odd sport that none of my friends cared about. That was my time with my dad. Hockey was ours. And leave it to dad to care about an NHL team where the owner wouldn’t televise home games. The Chicago Blackhawks, the team we rooted for, didn’t regularly show home games until the 2007-08 season.

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I got a lot of joy from watching those teams from about 2007 until 2016. I had been watching for well over a decade by that point and this was the first time there may have been hope for a hapless franchise. It came to light in 2021 that former Blackhawks player Kyle Beach was sexually abused by former team video coach Brad Aldrich during the team’s run to the 2010 Stanley Cup championship. He was 20 years old at the time.

I stopped watching hockey, especially the Blackhawks, after that. I couldn’t justify hiding sexual abuse in the name of championships. This isn’t a one-and-done incident in the sport. Hockey has a well documented history of sexual assault, with both women and men as the victims. 

Hockey isn’t for everyone, despite what one slogan claims. Beyond sexual assault, hockey has a strong foundation in racism, bullying, and conservative, exclusionary politics. The NHL – along with the MLB – is the most right-wing pro sports league in the US, according to some measures. 

The Tkachuk brothers, Jack Eichel, and other Team USA players and coaches proudly support Trump as he giddily unravels the constitutional order with the help of ghouls who hate the United States. Hockey greats including Jeremy Roenick and Wayne Gretzky have been photographed with Trump and others in his portfolio of goons. Gretzky even has Mar-a-lago face as a touching tribute to America’s first tyrant. 

Gretzky isn’t American, but cozying up to Trump doesn’t sit well with plenty of Canadians. Trump, Gretzky's buddy, is loathed internationally for painfully obvious reasons. 

Why cozy up to someone who only cares if you make him look good? What is there to gain? The president can’t acknowledge anyone who isn’t a loyalist. If you’re not sufficiently loyal, Trump will unleash an unhinged social media post to appease the gremlins looking for their next dopamine hit.

The men’s hockey gold medal win on the final day of competition was Trump’s first praise of any American athlete in Milan during the 2026 Winter Olympics, and it came with an invitation to the White House. It was also FBI Director Kash Patel’s ticket to feeling like a real boy hanging with the men’s hockey players as they celebrated their gold medal and seemed thrilled with Patel’s inexplicable locker room appearance. Since the men’s team was invited to visit with Trump, surely the U.S. women’s hockey team was invited as well, right?

The women’s team was invited to the White House as a joke to get a laugh from the men's team. The president said nothing of the women's squad's dominating performance on both ends of the ice, or the fact that Laila Edwards became the first Black woman to score for Team USA. He offered only a punchline about getting impeached if he didn’t include the ladies as well.

The punchline was as fulfilling as a third Trump impeachment would feel.

JD Vance, meanwhile, was booed constantly at the Winter Olympics. It got so bad that the Olympic broadcast seemed to alter audio to remove the many boo-birds. Imagine being so loathed that you don’t have to talk to be aggressively booed.

When the blackpilled Vance did talk, it was a reminder of why he is so universally hated.   

Vance attacked American-born freestyle skier Eileen Gu, who has chosen to represent China the past two winter games. Anyone in tune with international competition or a trustworthy search engine knows Gu chose in 2019 to represent China as she pursued Olympic aspirations. 2026 was the second time the California native competed for China. Gu had represented the United States prior to that decision.

In a February 17 interview with Fox News, Vance said,”I certainly think that somebody who grew up in the United States of America, who benefited from our education system, from the freedoms and liberties that make this country a great place, I would hope that they want to compete with the United States of America.”

It is embarrassing to attack, chastise, or belittle athletes for their personal choices. I can’t believe it’s a thing happening in this country. But it is.

I sat with my thoughts once the tears finally slowed. I thought about my dad, the joy of watching the Hawks on the road on a Saturday night. I thought about the joy hockey brings its hardcore fans – especially when the stakes are at their highest, as they were in the 2026 Winter Olympic games. I thought about my kids and the myriad challenges of being a parent, as a new catastrophe comes as often as the sun rises. I thought of all the pain and trauma the Trump regime has caused innocent people over the past year. 

I have tried to learn while handling my personal grief, anxiety, and depression that not all joy is going to feel the same. Very little in life is linear. You control what you can control and you let the rest fade away.

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My joy over the U.S. men’s hockey team’s gold medal win came with overwhelming sadness, and both were justified. I have gone through a ton since the beginning of 2025 and I am just now coming to a head on most of it. In the ecstasy that ensued after Hughes scored the game winner against Canada, I desperately wanted to experience the joy that comes with winning a gold, and my eyes welled up thinking about it.

After the initial burst of euphoria, I came back to earth. I felt fulfilled. I looked at the television as the elated U.S. players celebrated on the ice. I remembered who some of the players were in these games and how they presented themselves in celebration after the games were over: Their awful politics, their support for such terrible policies and people. It reminded me again of why I stopped watching hockey – irredeemable people and organizations. 

I hope in four years to have more clarity on this emotional juxtaposition when Team USA returns to international ice as the reigning gold medalists, perhaps in a slightly more stable, less dystopian culture and political environment. If I don’t, I can look back at the 2026 gold medal game as a starting point because I didn’t have that this time.