Dave Zirin, who is allegedly the sports editor for the hard-left political magazine The Nation when he’s not issuing nasty, virulently anti-Israel takes, co-wrote “The Ugly Underbelly of the US Hockey Victory” with political science professor Jules Boykoff. After the U.S. hockey team’s thrilling, gold-medal winning overtime win over arch-rivals Canada, the president of the United States called to congratulate them and they had a friendly, jokey chat. That’s all it took to make leftist heads like Zirin's explode, burning up any patina of professed patriotism they may have previously claimed. He was the latest bitter leftist to condemn the team for apparently not hanging up on the president of the United States or making a political statement after their athletic triumph. The US Olympic hockey team beat Canada 2–1 in overtime in the gold medal game at the 2026 Milano Cortina Olympics on Sunday. The Canadian team showed up angry. Our neighbors to the north were upset because of how bellicose and erratic President Donald Trump has been toward the nation he proposed making the 51st state. …. As for Team USA, it was ready to fight—literally—because Trump had deemed Canada, Canadian Bacon—style, the enemy, and the players were ready to follow orders. The US squad was chock-full of Trump supporters who were more than willing to provide a photo op for Vice President JD Vance and the embarrassing FBI director, Kash Patel. Surely Zirin doesn’t think the team needed Trump to inspire them to beat their nemesis to the North? Or for hockey players to engage in fighting on the ice? Zirin's medals of honor were instead reserved for the Olympic athletes who displayed petulant anti-Trumper antics. He unloaded two offensive paragraphs, one insulting the hockey team, the other former President Ronald Reagan. Unlike other US Olympians speaking out against this regime, men’s hockey players chose to be lickspittles. In that regard, this hockey team is part of a rather ignominious USA hockey gold-medal tradition. A fan at the 2026 Milano Cortina Games donned a hockey sweater with “1980” emblazoned across the chest, the year a US hockey team became a legendary symbol of national unity. But in the years that followed, Republicans have used that legend to sow division. The Nation writer, not content to ruin the 2026 Olympic champs, reached back to smear the 1980 hockey squad that upset the Soviet Union on the way to winning the gold, as well as Reagan. ….Pundits turned the victory into a right-wing symbol. It showed that the country had moved away from the social struggles of the 1960s and ’70s and embraced the crypto-fascist variant of patriotism best exemplified in the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan. Zirin of course preferred athlete Eileen Gu, the American-born and educated skier who competed for Communist China. He concluded about the anti-Trump athletes: “But the solidarity proffered by fellow Olympians was heartening. This is a pick-a-side moment in the United States, and they picked the right one.” At The Nation, that "right side" is never the side of the United States.