Playing Games With the Olympics: Sunset Media Bring TDS To Italy

“It brings up mixed emotions to represent the U.S. right now. It’s a little hard.” Snowboarder Hunter Hess

On the surface the 2026 Winter Olympics look like any old Olympics. Canada’s women’s hockey team outshooting the Swiss 55-6. Jamaica’s bobsleigh team back for one more (futile) try. Canada’s team outfits puffy. Snoop Dog watching curling. 41-year-old Lindsay Vonn trying to compete in the women’s downhill. 

But like the torn ACL that caused Vonn to crash in Sunday’s downhill, the Cortina/ Milano (should have been in Calgary) Games are limping around in a politically charged atmosphere. Having been shut out on pithy quotes at the Australian Open Tennis tournament, the world’s progressive sports media are fishing for gotcha’ quotes from athletes. And they’ve hooked a few.

Athletes like snowboarder Hunter Hess (above) and the #TDS segment are using the Games as a platform to whinge about not getting their way in Donald Trump’s America. "Just because I’m wearing the flag doesn’t mean I represent everything that’s going on in the US,” said sad-face Chris Lillis. Here’s the elitist daughter of doctors brought up on ski hills reading her prepared grievance script. 

US Olympics figure skater Amber Glenn says gay people are having a hard time in Trump’s administration. (Does she not know gay people are treated in the vast majority of Olympic countries she’s competing against?) The New York Times blasted “Americans at the Olympics Can’t Escape the Politics at Home: Opposition to President Trump’s policies has followed the U.S. team to Italy, and athletes, coaches and American fans are facing the backlash.”

The AP objects that countries like Team Sweden were "overwhelmingly white and lacking the immigrant representation”. Painfully hip CBC TV anchor Adrienne Arsenault and Toronto Star scribbler Bruce Arthur are monitoring Opening Ceremonies applause levels for the U.S. team and VP Vance like it was the Ted Mack Amateur Hour. “Oh there we have it… some booing, yes they’re booing the vice president…” 

Those with long memories will tell you that this potage of Olympic protest doesn’t hold a candle to the fuss in 1968 when Tommy Smith and John Carlos gave the black power salute on the podium after winning medals in the 200 metres. (They were sent home from Mexico City for insubordination). 

International judging in figure skating often ripped apart previous Games during the Cold War as Iron Curtain apparatchiks put a heavy thumb on the scales for their own competitors. Then there were the political boycotts of Moscow (1980) and Los Angeles (1984) where global politics inserted themselves into Summer Games.

So far, nothing like that. Yet. But it’s never smart to underestimate the invidious powers of those trying to import their cable-news grievance banners from America to Italy. Having lost decisively to Trump in the 2024 federal election on the issue of removing illegal aliens from the U.S., they’ve staged a non-stop tantrum in the ultra-liberal city of Minneapolis, employing hapless nebbishes to harass and interfere in the process of collecting those aliens— many of whom are felons with violent pasts. 

Much to the sadness (wink, wink) of the organizers funded by trust-fund billionaires a pair of these amateur detectives were killed when interfering in seizing felons hiding in that sanctuary city. Murder! they cried. In the best Alinskyist tradition the video of those deaths was then blasted 24/7 around the world. Shocked Euro liberals— themselves drowning in immigrant onslaughts— picked up on the anti-American rhetoric to deflect from their own problems. 

Which is how we found ourselves in the opening days of the Winter Games, parsing applause levels and monitoring DEI immersion among the competitors. While taking every opportunity to bask in the wonderfulness of diversity, the organizers inevitably face a dodgy problem. 

Sport is a merit-based enterprise where the best of the best overcome all the noise and faux equality to triumph. You can gerrymander the competition and include groups who might otherwise not have a chance to parade in the march of nations behind their flag. But reality finally insets itself and you see Switzerland get out-shot 56-7 and the Jamaicans finish up the track in bobsleigh. 

Unconsciously, the debate over the proper DEI levels coincides with the demise this week of the venerable establishment rag The Washington Post. In an effort to cut monumental losses at the paper the entire sports section was gassed— along with many on the foreign desk. To say the Post’s sports section was impressive is understating matters. Writers like Tom Boswell, Tony Kornheiser, Christine Brennan, Michael Wilbon and more were top of the trade.

But that was no help when the rest of the paper lost contact with its audience. Despite being in a government town WaPo’s point of intersection with the community was lost. First to social media. Then to stories such as Covid, where they bought the Anthony Fauci line on isolation, vaccines, children’s vulnerability to the virus, origin of Covid etc. 

It was reminiscent for us, to the time in 1996 when CBC cut sports from its national newscasts and current affairs. All the while insisting it needed to preserve its news divisions and foreign bureaus. We had three shows cancelled as CBC chased the business audience. A year later they were back to including sports in their news division again. Too late. The audience deserted to TSN, Sportsnet, The Score. 

CBC has the same issues— and the same attitudes. Canadian woke peddlars like George Strombolopoulos complain that not wanting to watch Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl halftime show is racist. According to the former CBC meat puppet, @strombo “Of all the things I’ve seen said about the [other] halftime show. This seems to be the [most] accurate.… the people who want “their own” halftime show are the same people who wanted their own drinking fountains.”

It’s almost comic to see how far from reality the TDS sufferers have drifted. Even as DEI, Covid and climate fade as hot-button issues they will still pushing the old agenda. Because you can always tell a liberal. You just can’t tell him much.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, his 2025 book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed Hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His new poetry collection In Other Words is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca and on Kindle books at https://www.amazon.ca/dp/1069802700