When Winning Is not enough

The mens olympic hockey team is making headlines everywhere following their huge win for the first time in years. However, it’s definitely not the win that is breaking the news. After the Olympic win, the men took the obvious option for them, partying with the head of the FBI and calling Donald Trump in the locker room, naturally. If anybody knows anything about the president, he will be sexist with little to no thoigt it seems. On the phone call, the men’s hockey team is invited to the white house to celebrate their victory over Canada. While it is traditional for athletic teams to make appearances in the white house after a large win on the international stage, it seems to be rare that a women’s team is invited. After the men’s team’s invitation was given to them trump continues to say, “ I must tell you, we’re going to have to bring the women’s team, you do know that”… and when talking about the potential of not inviting the other team, he says, “I do believe I probably would be impeached”. To the men, this was a huge joke, leading to the room exploding with laughs from the team.

This event is not only political; it’s a blatant show of sexism and the idea that women cannot be equal to men, even when winning gold, against the same team, in the same sport.

Following the phone call, as the media began to retaliate against the men’s team and the president, not one athlete in the locker room owned up to their show of sexism…

Obviously.

When this reached the women’s team, they declined the invitation to the white house, eventually leading to the media telling them to be more “grateful” that they were even to be invited at all.

This leads to the question, why do male athletes’ accomplishments get to be deemed patriotic while the women’s team celebrations are negotiated and scrutinized?

When removing yourself from the 2026 Olympic Games and the team’s victories, the debate between women’s and men’s hockey has run rampant for years. Just a few years ago, female hockey players were making $55,000 and asking for pay to make a living wage, which led to them being publicly insulted and being called ungrateful. But when looking at the men’s hockey team, the average player earns approximately ten MILLION dollars per year. All while playing the same sport. The kicker with the Olympic teams is that the women have won more times per year since women’s hockey was introduced as an Olympic sport.

After looking at all of the treatment that both teams have gotten from the media, it all comes down to one controversy that has not been talked about nearly enough. Which is how the power that male athletes hold in our country is so much that they even have the president treating women unfairly, which is a problem that we do not seem to have intentions of changing anytime soon. The double standard that is brushed over millions of peoples head everyday is disgusting and just dehumanizing to women athletes who work just as hard, if not harder than the men, just to receive not even half of the views and media coverage. The people who are choosing to defend the men’s hockey team love to use the excuse, “It is just sports, it doesn’t have to be political”. Yet, the women’s team is constantly turned into villains for wanting to be treated as equals.

This all leads to the idea that if there is sexism in a culture, it is going to easily reflect on different topics in the culture, in this case, specifically sports. And as a society, we need to reflect on who gets to celebrate and who gets deemed political.