Back in 2018, figure skater Adam Rippon objected to then vice president Mike Pence leading the US delegation to the Olympics in Pyeongchang, citing Pence’s track record on LGBTQ+ rights. At the time, Rippon, who came out as gay in 2015, said Pence doesn’t “stand for anything that I really believe in.”

Reflecting on it eight years later, Rippon says athletes speaking out about the Trump administration’s policies during the 2026 Games takes a lot more bravery than it did less than a decade ago.

The echo chamber is “a hundred times louder than it was during the first Trump administration,” Rippon says. Now, he says, athletes could face real repercussions for speaking out about ICE’s activities or anything else the administration is doing. But by speaking up, they’re giving the world a different view of how Americans feel about the country’s policies.

Theoretically, he adds, the Olympics are “supposed to be this apolitical event, where everything gets put to the side and we can come together” to celebrate athletes from everywhere. “Well, it’s not, right?” Rippon says. “I think that as an American right now, it’s impossible to believe that politics aren’t intertwined into everything that we do.”

Those messages—and the volleys between athletes and armchair pundits—are amplified by social media.

What’s been happening during the 2026 Winter Games feels of a piece with what happened at the Paris 2024 Summer Games, when gold-medal-winning Algerian boxer Imane Khelif got thrust into a culture war over trans people in sports, even though Khelif is not trans. Going further back, it’s reminiscent of the Mexico City Summer Games in 1968, during which Black US athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists in the air during their medal ceremony to draw attention to the civil rights struggles in America.

For Simone Driessen, this is part of a natural progression. An assistant professor of media and popular culture at Erasmus University Rotterdam, she says athletes speaking up about their beliefs is to be expected. As folks like Taylor Swift have become political figures, so too have athletes who enjoy similar levels of celebrity during the Games. “It reminds me a lot of how the Super Bowl halftime show was already perceived as political before we even knew what Bad Bunny wanted to do,” Driessen says.

The Bad Bunny comparison is apt. Much like Glenn or former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who began kneeling during the National Anthem to protest police brutality, he’s offered his views freely. They’ve mostly become “controversial” because they stand in opposition to the Trump administration and the MAGA agenda.

In their view, to be a great American athlete, or great entertainer, means compliance. When athletes reject that view, it feels like a win.