After flooding the zone with anti-Trump comments and questioning their own loyalty to the country they were representing at the Olympics, America’s Olympic athletes, so hyped and sure to win in the press … are going low on the medal count.
According to the Wall Street Journal:
MILAN—They came to Italy for a gold rush.
From the downhill course of Cortina to the cross-country tracks of Val di Fiemme and a figure skating rink on the edge of Milan, members of Team USA envisioned themselves spending the entire Olympics on the top steps of podiums. And with the biggest delegation here, they dreamed of a run that would surpass their record 10 gold medals the last time they hosted the Winter Games.
Then came the disastri.
One by one, America’s made-for-TV stars fell short of expectations. Lindsey Vonn crashed. Chloe Kim fell. Mikaela Shiffrin struggled. The most shocking fumble of all came on Friday night when figure skater Ilia Malinin, the self-proclaimed “quad god,” melted down in the brutal heat of the Olympic spotlight.
It was merely the latest disappointment of an Olympics souring faster than burrata in the sun for Team USA, which is suddenly on track for its fewest winter golds since 1998.
What a coincidence — not liking your country goes right there alongside not winning one’s match.
This is why wokester statements about politics, Trump, not liking the results of the last election, hating ICE, are such a bad idea before the games are over.
The Journal expressed bafflement as to why so many top-ranked athletes were washing out, But anyone with a lick of common sense could sense that if they were talking about Minneapolis to the press, they weren’t exactly focusing on their games.
They were restyling themselves as internet influencers, celebrities, people who had already won the games, imagining they could change the world now by making hate-Trump statements and changing everyone’s minds about the president. In reality, they were taking their eyes off the ball, focusing on their own games which is the only thing they should have been doing.
To be sure, not every athlete who washed out or failed to win gold was out there making woke statements. I didn’t hear any bad stuff from snowboarder Chloe Kim or ice skater Ilia Malinin.
But slalom skiier Mikaela Shiffrin was all in on the wokester tripe, sounding like a Minneapolis karen AWFL.
According to Newsweek, which compiled a library of wokester statements:
“I think there’s a lot of hardship in the world globally, and there’s a lot of heartbreak, there’s a lot of violence,” she said, when asked about the political climate in the U.S. “It can be tough to reconcile that when you’re also competing for medals in an Olympic event. I actually have some thoughts. I can read something that I had written.”
“Peace is not just the absence of conflict,” she read, quoting Mandela, an anti-apartheid activist and South Africa’s first Black president, before adding that she would show up with tenacity and work ethic while representing her values.
Oh, spare us. No wonder she didn’t win, she was so focused on virtue-signaling to the rest of us she didn’t deliver the goods — she slalomed poorly with low speed meaning both she and her partner “unexpectedly” missed the medal podium, Shiffrin actually placing 15th in her race, not first as predicted.
Another washout, Malinin, was a sad story, falling twice and underperforming on various leaps and jumps in his ice-skating program. I was sorry for him because he had been hyped so hard in the press, while two of the biggest wokester statement-makers — Shiffrin and skater Amber Glenn, loudly offered their support, meaning, unintentionally laid a lot of extra pressure on him. In reality, it might have been the two wokester kisses of death.
As I noted, he didn’t make any political statements that I am aware of, and he believed he was focused on his game, but it’s possible that with the plethora of woke statements and media attention for the wokesters there was social contagion in the Olympic village, making it hard for him to concentrate, too. Woke statements not only distract athletes from their own games, they can distract other athletes, too. And if they were conservative athletes, it might have even been worse. In addition it could not have helped that creeps from outside, as Newsweek reported, were sending nasty threats and notes, too.
Who needs that before a high stakes game one has trained years to get to? Now they go home not as champions with medals, but people who said woke things as their claim to fame. What a loathesome tradeoff. Maybe the next crop of athletes will be wiser, or the USOC will set some protective ground rules to keep them on the straight and narrow to the medals.