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The 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team did not have the option to just play a game. Several members of that squad have said that as they prepared to face the dominant Soviet team at Lake Placid, New York, they read a telegram from a woman in Texas who wrote only, “Beat those commie bastards.” (Apocryphal or not, the story made its way into the 2004 Disney movie Miracle.)
In 1980, the Cold War was at its frostiest. In the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, President Jimmy Carter was whipping up international support for the coming boycott of that summer’s games in Moscow. And domestically, the share of the American public that had an unfavorable general attitude toward communism as a system of government had gone from 36 percent in 1953 to 49 percent by February 1979. It soared to 73 percent by mid-1980.
During those Winter Games, the U.S. government and America writ large were eager for a rally-around-the flag moment. The U.S. hockey team played its role perfectly. As a writer put it in the Toledo Blade, on Feb. 22, 1980, “The Soviet Union went down and the rumble out of the homes and bars and restaurants and clubs must have crept into the Kremlin.”
Now, 46 years later, the U.S. Olympic teams have stepped into a very different environment at the Milan Cortina Games. This year’s American hockey squads, now both men and women, are no underdogs, unlike the Miracle on Ice team. They are, though, once again primed for a meeting with a country that’s been in their government’s geopolitical crosshairs.
The women’s tournament (which is just now entering its knockout rounds) is almost certain to come down to a gold medal game between Team USA and Team Canada, as it has in all but one Olympics since women’s hockey joined the program in 1998. The men’s tournament (which is about to begin) is more open but has a clear favorite and a clear No. 2: Canada and the United States, in that order.
The primary difference between this confluence of hockey and politics and the legendary one from 1980 is that this time, Americans are not on their own government’s side. Donald Trump’s wish to annex Canada enjoyed 20 percent support last spring and could be even less popular now. Trump has wielded tariffs, his preferred economic weapon, against our neighbors to the north, and most of his constituents don’t care for that either. Twice as many Americans find his tariffs “mostly negative” as find them “mostly positive,” Pew reported this month. And whatever voters think of tariffs in general, they like them less when they’re pointed elsewhere in North America.
The 1980 Miracle on Ice had a certain poetry about it, as the country made a hockey team into a set of ambassadors for freedom. The American coach, Herb Brooks, was a famous motivator. His locker-room speech before the game against the Soviets, dramatized for Disney’s audience, was apparently good in real life, too. But this time, the soaring oratory points against America. Trump rambles about Canada on Truth Social while Prime Minister Mark Carney goes to the World Economic Forum and gives the speech of his life about countering American hegemony.
I’ll grant that the USA-Canada hockey battles to come at these Olympics don’t drip with political expression quite the same way as 1980. The two countries are only fighting an economic war, not proxy physical wars, and Canada’s players and coaches have gone out of their way not to make a spectacle out of the nations’ diplomatic conflicts. Plus, the 2026 Olympic hockey arena, as unfinished as it may be, is situated in Milan, not Lake Placid.
Still, there is only so much a bunch of hockey players can do to fight gravity. When the Americans played games in Canada as part of last year’s 4 Nations Face-Off, a tournament staged by the NHL, Canadian fans booed “The Star-Spangled Banner.” American star Matthew Tkachuk told reporters he “didn’t like it” and then began the teams’ ensuing game by fighting Canada’s Brandon Hagel directly after the opening faceoff. There were two more fistfights in the game’s first nine seconds.
In case you thought the Americans were just boys being boys, general manager Bill Guerin made sure to say otherwise. “I think there was a little bit of a political flair to it. It’s just the time that we’re in. I think our guys used that as inspiration,” he told the press.
Guerin practically begged Trump to show up to the championship game, a U.S.-Canada rematch. Trump called into the locker room instead, before the Americans lost in overtime in Boston on a wrist shot by the world’s greatest player, Canada’s Connor McDavid. Canada’s outgoing prime minister and incoming Katy Perry boyfriend, Justin Trudeau, posted, “You can’t take our country–and you can’t take our game.”
There is no political subtext to this rivalry at the moment. There is only text, in boldface.
All Olympics are fraught with politics. If they weren’t, the Russian hockey teams would be playing in this tournament. There will be very few nations competing in the Winter Games whose realities the Trump administration hasn’t upended. The Americans will face Denmark in a bunch of events while Trump muses about taking Greenland. But it’s the looming hockey games between the U.S. and Canada that, at least in North America, will make the geopolitics inescapable. In these Olympics, the American hockey teams will be emissaries of a politics that much of the world, and much of America, doesn’t support. Welcome to the Reverse Miracle on Ice.
The women’s tournament is America’s to lose. The U.S. had rattled off six wins in a row against their neighbors entering the Olympic tournament, most of them in blowouts. But Canada has the United States’ historical number and the best player in the world, forward Marie-Philip Poulin. Given all those factors, the Americans were a clear but not overwhelming favorite, with markets giving them about a 60 percent chance to win it all.
After Tuesday’s group play match-up between the two countries, the odds now look much more squarely in the Americans’ favor. Poulin got hurt earlier in the week, and her teammates got drubbed in an anticlimactic rout, 5-0. There should still be a rematch between these two teams for the gold, but it would now be Miracle-adjacent if the Canadians could pull off a victory against an ascendant American team.
Regardless of the outcome, the women’s rivalry is respectful, up to and including several players from the two programs deciding to marry each other. The same cannot be said of the (non-amorous, so far as we know) heated rivalry between the Canadian and American men’s teams. Their tournament shapes up as an all-timer. The NHL skipped the 2018 and 2022 Olympics due to administrative disputes and the pandemic. Now the pros are back, meaning we’ll finally get to see the world’s two best players, McDavid and Nathan MacKinnon, suit up on Olympic ice. They’ll play with Sidney Crosby, the Canadian captain and best player of this century as well as a top-five player ever. It feels a bit like a hockey eclipse. Even better, Canada has 19-year-old wunderkind Macklin Celebrini, the San Jose Sharks goal-scorer who appears at this early stage to be on a Crosby-adjacent path.
Meanwhile, the Americans have perhaps the deepest player pool in their history. Defenseman Quinn Hughes is a Hall of Famer in the making. Goalie Connor Hellebuyck is the best in the world, to the extent any goalie is the best at anything for more than five minutes at a time.
The team’s forwards can score a lot of goals: Auston Matthews, Tkachuk and his brother Brady, Jack Eichel, Jake Guentzel, and on down the line. Both teams play their first game on Thursday.
Off the ice, one side has been way more, let’s say, politically engaged than the other. Members of the 1980 U.S. team, whose living members remain front-line ambassadors for USA Hockey, have campaigned for Trump and visited him at the White House. Guerin groveled to make Trump a living mascot for Team USA in the 4 Nations. Matthew Tkachuk, the American forward, joked (maybe) that visiting with Trump at the White House was better than winning the past two Stanley Cups.
On the Canadian side, Crosby punted last year when given a chance to say anything about Trump, the Canadian government, or the hostilities between their two countries. His declaration: “I’m not going to get into that.” Jon Cooper, the Canadian coach who spends most of his time in Tampa coaching the NHL’s Lightning, also opted for deescalation when tensions flared around the national anthems last year. Possible reasons for Team Canada’s general reticence include Canadian politeness, agreement among at least some Canadian hockey types with Trump’s policies, and the not-unreasonable fear that Canadian NHL players could have their visas messed with if they should have the temerity to criticize Trump for threatening their country.
The one Canadian figure who has gotten enmeshed in controversy, oddly, is icon of the Great White North Wayne Gretzky, an old friend of Trump’s who over the past year has shown an almost incomprehensible lack of support for his home country. As Trump began antagonizing his nation, Gretzky remained dead silent, infuriating many Canadians. Gretzky finally defended himself on a podcast nine months after the uproar, saying people would “believe what they want” and offering a platitude: “I know in my heart I’m Canadian, I’ve stayed Canadian, and I’m a Canadian for life.” What is one’s birth country, after all, compared to a good wedge salad after 18 holes at Mar-a-Lago?
How the politics and pucks shake out over the next two weeks will depend on a few factors. While the American and Canadian women are extremely likely to play for gold, the men’s teams are not guaranteed a matchup: Finland, Sweden, and Czechia could all get in the way. If the USA and Canada do play in the men’s tournament, the possible outcomes run a wide gamut. The political circus could become overwhelming if, say, Carney gives a rousing pregame speech in the Canadian locker room. Or what if J.D. Vance, looking for something to do, shows up for a photo op with the American group?
On the ice, there could be more Trump-fueled fighting, or the spectacle could be limited to snippy press releases from heads of state and consulates. Or, just maybe, the teams will play a great hockey game, as they did in the championship round of the 4 Nations and in the 2010 Olympic gold medal game, both won by Canada. Do you believe in miracles?
