Generally, I operate under a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy regarding an athlete’s political beliefs. As a careful observer of the hit HBO documentary “Heated Rivalry,” I found that absolutely zero of the players were reading “The State and Revolution*” or speaking complimentarily of Che Guevara. By the end of the show, I suspected that hockey players may not be entirely aligned with me politically.

In fact, statistically, you can probably guess where the average player leans. It just feels like there’s little upside to looking into what players believe or to bringing the topic up. Is that good or bad on my part, as a writer? I don’t know. It’s just how I do it. I want to enjoy watching the people I’m paid to watch, so I try turning off that part of my brain.

So it’s weird that just hours after Team USA won Olympic Gold, we got a massive breach of the “Stick to Sports” social contract when we saw podcaster-turned-FBI Director Kash Patel partying in the locker room.

Lest you confuse him with College of New Jersey hockey legend Kush Patel, Kash has no ties to high-level hockey or this team. He had nothing to do with Team USA’s victory, and seemingly little right to be in the locker room celebrating. Patel was just pounding Coronas with a bunch of 20-somethings, just like FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover once did after Team USA won Gold in 1960, or CIA Director and JFK assassin George H.W. Bush did in 1980.

The idea that sports exist in an apolitical bubble is, of course, fiction. That goes doubly for the Olympics, where tremendous resources are diverted into two weeks of games for little long-term benefit to the communities they take place in. And that’s just one aspect of the politics!

The Gold Medal Game took place on the 46th anniversary of the “Miracle on Ice,” a piece of Cold War propaganda so enduring that the players involved get microwaved and trotted out for political campaigns four decades later. We don’t have to go back to 1980 to see the geopolitical implications surrounding Sunday’s game, either. The United States, which is sabre-rattling in both hemispheres, went head-to-head against a country Donald Trump is waging a trade war against and has threatened to annex multiple times.

These are extreme times, so the examples here are extreme, in turn. But there’s a baseline of politics that is more or less accepted as normal. For example, there wouldn’t be an article here about politics when Team USA went to the White House. Would I personally accept an invitation in that spot? No, but attendance is viewed as an apolitical tradition, even if there have been notable exceptions for multiple reasons over the years.

There’s a normal level of political interaction expected when you’re a championship team. And then there’s letting some F-Tier member of a sinking ship administration attach themselves to your success like a barnacle.

Outside of the bubble of NHL locker rooms, it seems, the Trump Administration is wildly unpopular. In December, Gallup polled Trump’s approval rating at 36%, which has yet to be updated in 2026, as Gallup decided to retire measuring Presidential approval after 88 years. The President has seemingly stopped going to sporting events because he tends to get booed at any game he appears in the stands. Notably, Trump was not present in Milan for the Gold Medal Game.

Just to pick a player with a random number generator, you might not expect Jeremy Swayman, age 27, to have much knowledge of Patel or his body of work. But it would make sense for Bill Guerin, the team’s general manager, to step in and find some way to tell his locker room, “Maybe you don’t want to have the biggest day of your life immortalized with a video of you partying with a guy whose legacy is tied to Jeffrey Epstein.”

Nope. Turns out, Guerin is friends with Patel and personally invited him into the festivities. It’s kind of weird that the GM of the Minnesota Wild would be tight with an agent of the government that’s spent the last two months occupying the state he lives in, but maybe Guerin is just a big fan of Patel’s novels.

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In all seriousness, Guerin didn’t hesitate to contaminate his victory with the stink of an extremely unpopular administration, or to drag 25 of his players into an avoidable PR hit. Guerin made sure that a selection of his fanbase will remember Patel donning a gold medal he didn’t earn and showering Team USA with beer as much as they remember Jack Hughes‘ broken smile, Connor Hellebuyck‘s performance, and the team’s touching tribute to Johnny Gaudreau.

And, hey, maybe the whole squad in the sober light of day would go right back to doing kegstands with a 45-year-old cop. But I don’t want to know, and Guerin’s violation of the sporting world’s social contract means Sunday’s memories will carry a nasty aftertaste that simply didn’t have to be there. 

*In fairness, I’ve only skimmed the Spark Notes.

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