The 2026 Winter Olympics should have been a golden moment for American hockey. Both the men’s and women’s teams won gold. The sport was already in the middle of a cultural surge, fueled in part by the massive fandom that had formed around Heated Rivalry, the breakout series that made hockey newly legible to audiences who had never cared much about it before. In the weeks before the Games, ice hockey was trending on Google. Women joked about going to the “boy aquarium,” turning the rink into a kind of female-gaze spectacle.
And yet, as the men’s hockey team celebrated its historic gold, besting Canada in an overtime nail-biter, a viral locker-room phone call with President Donald Trump fractured that afterglow.
What should have been a shared moment of national pride instead curdled into something more familiar. On speakerphone, with FBI Director Kash Patel holding the phone inside the locker room, Trump invited the team to the White House and joked that he would “probably be impeached” if he didn’t also invite the gold medal–winning women’s team, reducing their victory to a political aside. Players laughed. The video spread. And just like that, the most dominant force in American hockey — women — was repositioned not at the center of the story, but at its margins.
Online, the reaction was immediate. The clip moved quickly through the same feeds that had helped turn hockey into a cultural moment.
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American women’s hockey has long been the standard-bearer for the sport internationally. Since women’s hockey was introduced at the Olympics in 1998, the U.S. has won a medal in every Games, including multiple golds, and has consistently been one of the two defining powers alongside Canada. Their victory in Milan, where they also defeated Canada in overtime, wasn’t a surprise. It was a continuation of nearly three decades of dominance — and part of a larger pattern at these Olympics, where women accounted for eight of Team USA’s 12 gold medals.
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Across the Games, women also shaped the emotional core of the Olympics. Figure skater Alysa Liu’s joy on the ice felt almost contagious, her delight visible in every movement. When she stepped onto the podium, she celebrated alongside the silver and bronze medalists from Team Japan, smiling and pulling them into an embrace in a moment that felt inclusive rather than hierarchical, a reminder that victory doesn’t have to come at someone else’s expense.
It was the kind of victory that made the sport feel bigger, not smaller.
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But that spirit of inclusivity existed alongside a more complicated reality.
Tension had already been simmering throughout these Olympics. Several Team USA athletes, including figure skater Amber Glenn and freestyle skier Hunter Hess, had spoken openly about their discomfort representing the country amid the current political climate, particularly as immigration enforcement policies and ICE raids intensified back home. Hess, who became an unlikely lightning rod after criticizing the administration, put it bluntly at a press conference: “Just because I’m wearing the flag doesn’t mean I represent everything that’s going on in the U.S.” In response, Trump called him a “real loser” on Truth Social, and Hess said he used the president’s comments as motivation during his halfpipe qualifying round.
Meanwhile, the women’s hockey team rejected Trump’s insincere invite to the White House.
Trump’s relationship with athletes, especially women, has long been fraught. He has publicly targeted prominent female athletes who criticized him and falsely questioned the legitimacy of Olympic women’s competitors in the past. That history made his locker-room talk land differently. For many watching, it felt like part of a larger pattern of diminishing women, even in moments of undeniable achievement.
The same screens that welcomed women into hockey also showed them exactly where they still stand — just outside the glass.
