Tarnished Olympic Gold

“Citius, Altius, Fortius – Communiter” : “Faster, Higher, Stronger – Together”
– Current Olympic motto adopted in 2021 to emphasize solidarity during challenging times

It is a long distance and many decades away from a 2026 locker room in Milan, Italy to a 1963 jail cell in Birmingham, Alabama. Nevertheless, that is where this post Olympic blog post begins. It begins with the juxtaposition of two vastly differing events that pit justice against injustice and moral character against amoral, unprincipled, dishonorable and degrading behavior. It begins with two vastly different messages to set the stage for what follows.

The first message came from the President of the United States during a phone call to the gold medal men’s hockey team in their locker room following their overtime defeat of Canada. The call was emanating from the speaker of the FBI Director’s cell phone, an interloper who was chugging beers with the boys like they were at a frat party. His “boss” was informing the team that he was inviting them to a celebration at the White House, and that they would get a special military transport back to the states. He then with great bravado stated, “I must tell you, we have to bring the women’s team, you do know that.” The whole locker room then broke into spontaneous, raucous laughter. “I do believe I probably would be impeached, OK?” More laughter ensued.

At this point it should be noted that just three days earlier, the USA women’s hockey team had also defeated the Canadian women’s team in overtime to win gold. It was the third time in Olympic history that the women’s team had won gold, more gold than the men have won. Yet following their victory there was no courtesy call from the President congratulating them on their accomplishment, no invitation to party at the White House and no promise of a flight back home on military aircraft. Nothing. Just crickets.

The second message in this tale of two cities took place in Birmingham, Alabama in April of 1963. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was there to lead a nonviolent campaign against extreme racial segregation by organizing protests, boycotts, and direct actions designed to desegregate businesses and public spaces. For this he was jailed on Good Friday, and during his incarceration he crafted his now famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail. In it he delivered this moral message:“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.“

I believe that when he penned those words from his cell, he was saying that when people are treated unjustly and unfairly in one place without redress, it makes injustice acceptable in any place. Like a cancer originating in one organ of the body, left to its own means the aggressive cells metastasize to corrupt the entire organism. Whatever affects one cell directly, affects all cells indirectly, for each bodily system operates in an inescapable network of mutuality.

The lesson here for me is that injustice, in whatever form it takes, whatever the magnitude, wherever and whenever it occurs must be confronted and called out for what it is. It must be labeled as unacceptable. Silence in the face of injustice, however it appears, is complicity. A blog that seeks to address justice, justice for all God’s creation, cannot, therefore, be complicit when injustice in any form and at any place rears its ugly head.

But, of course, it is humanly impossible, given current events, to speak to and act upon every injustice that infects the world in which we live, for those injustices are legion. The swamp of evil grows deeper and wider by the day and by the hour. I have at times been asked how it is that I choose what to blog about and when to do so. My typical response goes something like this: “There is no discipline or schedule to it. It happens whenever the Spirit moves me to do so.”

What that oft times means for me is that the Spirit manifests itself in gut feelings. As I search today for the term that best describes the visceral emotion that prompts this post, I am settling upon the word ‘disgust.’ Did you know that according to a Biological Psychology article, disgust is one of the most important of human emotions, and that it is not a singular emotion, but shows up in two forms, core disgust and moral disgust.

So, what’s the difference in the two? “Core disgust is a basic emotion (Toronchuk and Ellis, 2007a, Toronchuk and Ellis, 2007b) that is elicited rapidly and automatically when ongoing affective and cognitive processes interact to activate adaptive behavioral and mental responses that encourage avoidance of the stimulus or event being appraised (Izard, 2007).”

“In contrast, moral disgust is associated with behaviors that violate human dignity (Rozin, Lowery, Imada, & Haidt, 1999), and in some case justice (Sanfey, Rilling, Aronson, Nystrom, & Cohen, 2003), and is an emotion involving higher order cognition and complex appraisals (Clark, 2010, Roseman, 2004).”

So, now I know that it is moral disgust, that emotional and cognitive response to behaviors that violate human dignity and justice that kicked in as I watched and listened to the video of what took place in that men’s Olympic locker room. It is moral disgust that sickened my stomach as I beheld the raucous, juvenile laughter of the man-boys in response to the rude, crude, misogynistic comment from the President that he would, of course, be obliged to also invite the women’s hockey team to a White House celebration, lest he be threatened with impeachment. It was his Trumpian form of belittling humor that compliant sycophants (like the beer chugging locker room interloper, Cash Patel) are eager to react to with disingenuous, or worse yet, genuine laughter.

It is one thing to witness that kind of mindless, herd mentality from the President’s faithful. That has become commonplace under the current authoritarian regime. But to watch the ‘golden boys’ of USA hockey yukking it up as their President makes belittling, disparaging remarks about their golden female counterparts is disgusting to the core, or more correctly to the ‘moral’ center.

Soon after the video of the locker room fiasco hit social media, the Move On organization drafted a petition asking for a formal apology from the USA men’s hockey team, and urging them to refrain from attending the State of the Union (SOTU) address. The closing paragraph of the invitation to the petition reads: “The ‘locker room talk’ that we caught a glimpse of is part of the same culture that systemically harms women. We need men to speak out when women athletes are being disrespected—not validate misogyny with their laughter. Every single member of the U.S. men’s hockey team owes the women’s team an apology. And they need to follow their apology up with action.

While upwards of 30,000 citizens have signed, the men chose to attend a McDonald’s laced White House reception, and followed up by showing up at the SOTU like pawns on a political chess board. And no formal team apology has appeared, only a few players have responded to public pressure with belated regrets. Meanwhile, in an ABC interview, Hilary Knight, captain of the victorious women’s team, stated with pure grace and moral character that it was unfortunate that a “distasteful joke” by Trump had overshadowed the achievements of US athletes at the Milan-Cortina Games. “How we speak about women matters, and we need to celebrate this team,” Knight said Thursday on Good Morning America.

As disgusting as the men’s ludicrous laughter and bohemian behavior to Trump’s misogynistic remarks was, I want to end this post on an upbeat note of joyful celebration, not for Olympic gold, but for the priceless love that brings two human beings together in an affectionate, committed relationship no matter their gender. Apart from winning gold in Milan, the best thing that Hillary Knight did at these 2026 Olympics was to place an engagement ring on the finger of her partner and fellow Olympian (speed skater), Brittany Bowe.

Four years after they first came together in the Olympic Village in Beijing, Knight got down on one knee in Milan, bringing their Olympic love story full circle, a storybook ending to their Olympic careers. “Olympics brought us together,” Knight wrote on Instagram. “This one made us forever.”

While it is an unfortunate reality that such an Olympic moment may leave many folks disgusted, it serves for me as a moral counterpoint and positive conclusion to a post that began with a locker room tale of human indignity and injustice by men of privilege acting like spoiled and disrespectful children.

With that, I’ll close with the words first sung by Maurice Chevalier in the musical GIGI way back when I was a teenage boy just beginning to appreciate the wonders of that opposite sex:

Thank heaven for little girls
They grow up in the most delightful way
Those little eyes so helpless and appealing
One day will flash and send you crashing through the ceiling
Thank heaven for little girls
Thank heaven for them all
No matter where, no matter who
Without them, what would little boys do?
Thank heaven
Thank heaven
Thank heaven for little girls