Welcome! This is the first edition of my sports newsletter. Since spending the last year writing my honors thesis about sports politics, I’ve gotten totally hooked on the more structural/academic side of sports and want to keep researching and exploring it. This issue includes a digest of some recent headlines and a deep-dive into how Canadian-American tensions have historically (and are now) spilling over into ice hockey.

Headlines

The Enhanced Games want their drug-fueled world records to count.

• The Peter Thiel and Donald Trump Jr. backed enterprise plans to use the publicity around their events to sell their audience supplements. But their ethos is not just about performance enhancing drugs. While Greek swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev is certainly taking a litany of drugs that are helping him build muscle, he’s also wearing a full-body ‘supersuit’ that’s been banned since 2009. Why do we draw the line of acceptable modifications to the human body where it currently is? Do you agree with where the line is right now? Maybe we should be questioning it more. On the other hand, do we really want to incentivize athletes to take drugs that may enhance their performance but harm their long-term health? (And on the other other hand, have we fully reckoned with how much of elite-level sports training is already harmful to athletes’ long-term health?)

The French Open keeps only scheduling men in the prime-time night matches.

• All women’s matches are happening during the day in front of smaller audiences. This streak goes back to 2023, where only one women’s match took place at night as compared to nine men’s matches, just like in 2022. French Tennis Federation president Gilles Moretton defended the choice as “putt[ing] the better match…for the spectators” and tournament director Amelie Mauresmo pointed to match duration as the decisive factor, since the men play best-of-five while the women play best-of-three. Coco Gauff, Ons Jabeur, and Jessica Pegula have all spoken out against the scheduling decisions.

Carter Hart, former Philadelphia Flyers goalie, is the first of the five 2018 Canadian World Juniors Team hockey players accused of sexual assault to take the stand in the Hockey Canada Trial.

• Hockey Canada had settled with the accuser out of court in May 2022. Soon after, TSN reporter Rick Westhead broke the story, leading to an audit and parliamentary hearing revealing that Hockey Canada had used public funds to settle nine sexual assault suits since 1989. Kate Strang and Dan Robson have been providing great ongoing coverage at the Athletic, and a full timeline of events as of February 2024 by Kristen Shilton is available here.

Deep Dive: Ice Hockey as International Relations

With the NHL’s Stanley Cup Finals set as a rematch of last year’s, the Edmonton Oilers against the Florida Panthers, the Oilers stand poised to potentially not only win the cup, but to break a 31 year drought for their country. When the Panthers won last year, major news organizations like the Associated Press and Reuters reported the outcome not as a win for Florida, but as a loss for Canada as a whole. No Canadian team has won the Stanley cup since 1993, despite its reputation as the birthplace and home of hockey.

But this year feels different. With growing anti-American sentiment in Canada, this year’s quest for the cup is charged with more nationalism than usual. Throughout the beginning of 2025, tensions rose with both anthems booed by various crowds, and even Prime Ministers and Presidents weighing in on hockey. The building pressure culminated in the NHL’s Four Nations Face-Off, the perfect flashpoint to ignite recent US-Canadian tensions over President Donald Trump’s foreign policy. But it’s not the only time something like this has happened. Ice hockey has been a significant venue for international relations in Canada since the Cold War, and by looking back on the role its played, we can gain insight on how the game acts similarly or differently today.

International sports have always amplified nationalist tendencies. By having athletes compete not for themselves, but under the flag of their country, events like the Olympic Games immediately give spectators something in common with an athlete, and therefore an easy reason to root for them. As the Games grew bigger, more spectacular, and more televised throughout the 20th century, they became more overt propaganda venues as well. Throughout the Cold War, international sporting success was a marker of an advanced nation, a country with the vitality and strength (or enough money to throw at the problem) to produce the world’s best athletes. Though the US and USSR soaked up most of the attention on the world’s stage, other countries asserted parts of their national identity through sports as well. With ice hockey as the national game of Canada, why shouldn’t the Canadians dominate Olympic and World Cup hockey?

The problem was the double-edged sword of the NHL in the post-war era, which grew the game and created unprecedented hockey spectacles, but also made its athletes ineligible for international play since the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) required all players to be amateurs until the late 1970s. Instead, the Soviets dominated international hockey thanks to their ‘state amateur’ system, in which athletes nominally held other jobs, but in reality were paid to train full-time.

Canadian frustration over a lack of international success at their national game mounted. In 1970, Hockey Canada attempted to host an international tournament and hire a professional team, but Russia, Czechoslovakia, Sweden, Finland and East Germany all pulled out last minute when they thought their amateurs’ eligibility for the next Olympics could be compromised. Canada then decided to boycott international ice hockey tournaments for the next seven years until the IIHF opened up its tournament eligibility. 

In the meantime, they searched for other options, which culminated in the 1972 Summit Series. It was the first time a professional Canadian team would play against the Soviet national squad. The series of eight games was meant as a bridge to improve Canadian-Soviet relations–but also to reassert Canadian hockey dominance. The series, though tight, was eventually won by Canada with a 4-3-1 (win-loss-tie) record. Still, the Soviets outscored the Canadians, and it was close enough that instead of focusing on the loss, Soviet newspaper writers spun the series as breaking down “the myth of Canadian pros’ invincibility.”

Soviet writers also discussed the playstyle of the Canadian hockey team, accusing them of engaging in a “brutal and dirty way of playing.” NHL hockey was indeed more violent than international hockey; it was played on a smaller ice surface and had introduced body checking anywhere on the ice much earlier, while the IIHF had only allowed body checking in the defensive half of the ice until 1969.

Beyond the effects of environment on play, it was also true that Canada and the USSR took different training approaches. While Canadian hockey programs focused on the building of individual skills, the Soviet system instead prioritized teamwork. Anatoli Tarasov, coach of Moscow’s Central Red Army Club and the architect of the Soviet hockey program, preached communist values to his athletes. They were to play “kollektivnii khokkei,” or collective hockey. The national team excelled at skating, precision passing, discipline, and team play. This well-oiled Soviet machine trained together year round, while the Canadian crew of stars pulled together from across the NHL, despite their individual skills, often struggled against the Soviets’ superior cohesion.

At this point, the historical parallel between the Summit Series and this year’s 4 Nations Face-Off may seem like one where the U.S. takes the place of the USSR, but that’s not quite it. Despite not taking part in the series itself, the U.S., and more specifically American NHL team owners, played a significant part in shaping it.

The NHL was founded in 1917 in Montreal, but its organizational core soon migrated south of the border, making money off bigger markets and commercializing. By the mid century, the majority of clubs were in the U.S., and despite bouts of expansionism, the proportion of Canadian teams kept shrinking. However, the vast majority of athletes in the NHL were still Canadians. In effect, this meant that the NHL was siphoning Canada’s hockey talent off into various U.S. cities and, by making them professionals, damaging Canada’s ability to compete on an international level. In 1970 Charles Hay, president of Hockey Canada, estimated that the team it was able to ice at international amateur competitions was only its 31st best team.

But the NHL’s reach into the Canadian hockey ecosystem didn’t end at the professional level. Sports academic and author Bruce Kidd wrote in 1970,

“The Canadian community invests a great deal in the production, as it were, of good hockey players…The size of the investment is often considerable. Every hamlet boasts an arena, although its construction often requires years of saving and months of volunteer labour. Many a municipal budget is spend largely on minor hockey, to the deliberate neglect of alternative programmes. Because the development of good players is thus essentially a community enterprise, the choicest fruits of this enterprise—games between the most highly skilled athletes—should be a community benefit. Yet they are not.”

Beyond exporting young Canadian talent, the NHL also had its fingers directly in this development. The Canadian Amateur Hockey Association (CAHA) had signed a series of deals with the NHL starting in the late 1930s that allowed the NHL to set its playing rules, the conditions of amateur eligibility, and dictated how the CAHA could spend its funds and direct its programs. One of the agreements between the NHL and the CAHA allowed NHL teams to sponsor two Junior A teams, which themselves would sponsor Junior B teams, and so on. In practice, this gave mostly American NHL owners considerable control over large swaths of the Canadian youth hockey ecosystem. 

The NHL’s refusal to give Vancouver, or any other city in Canada, an expansion team when it doubled from 6 teams to 12 in 1966 only furthered this sense of resentment. After the announcement, businessman Douglas Gordon called the decisions “a flagrant misdemeanor to Canada as a nation” and argued that the federal government should put a $25,000 tax on American teams for each Canadian player on their rosters. The outrage wasn’t just about the one expansion team. It traced its roots back to the deeper sense that Canada’s national sport was being exported and sold for maximum profit, with no regard for its place of origin and the place that kept supplying its players. The final nail in the coffin was during the 1968 Stanley Cup Finals, when instead of broadcasting a game Saturday night on Hockey Night in Canada, the NHL prioritized its U.S. TV networks and set the game for Sunday afternoon instead.

Beyond this, there were broader rising political tensions between Canada and the U.S. at the time. Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau “viewed U.S. economic and cultural dominance as a greater threat to Canada’s independence and sovereignty than the military danger the USSR posed.” The relationship between the two countries is what scholars describe as “asymmetric,” meaning that Canada, whose population and GDP are roughly one tenth of the side of the U.S.’s, is a lot more affected by U.S. fiscal and economic policy decisions than the other way around. The “ever-shifting mood” of the White House on issues like natural resources and environmental regulations are a source of consistent uncertainty since the U.S. is Canada’s biggest trade partner. The Summit Series was the perfect way to establish positive diplomatic relations with the USSR, perhaps in the hopes of gaining some independence, while also taking back Canada’s national sport which had been so commodified by the United States

Trudeau created a task force to try to improve Canada’s international hockey outcomes. The group blamed the NHL and U.S.-based minor league teams for not making players available for the national team, and also complained about how the league pushed “roughness, spills, fights, and speed…to lure crowds, especially in the U.S.,” foreshadowing the allegations of unsportsmanlike play noted by Soviet writers. 

With the 1972 Summit Series coming up, Canadian hockey officials finally made a deal with NHL owners who agreed to let their players take part under one condition: no one from their competitor, the World Hockey Alliance (WHA), was allowed on the team. Unfortunately, this included Bobby Hull, one of the all-time greats who had just that season left the NHL to play for the WHA’s Winnipeg Jets. NHL Commissioner Clarence Campbell justified the league’s decision, saying that there was “no reason why we should put on parade the showpiece of the other side. You don’t show off the competition’s best product”

Canadians were, once again, outraged. They didn’t care about the business side of things; they just wanted to be represented by their best hockey players on the international stage. The NHL, and the monied American interests it represented, had again put profits and commercialization over the good of the game. Hockey fans protested, sending petitions to the NHL, Hockey Canada, and members of Parliament. This was “U.S. imperialists manipulating Hockey Canada,” columnist Dick Beddoes wrote, “Professional hockey is controlled by willful, self-enlightened operators in the United States.”

The magnitude of this slight made it all the way to the top. Trudeau cabled Hockey Canada, urging them to do whatever it took to get Hull on the team. The NHL refused. The White House had absolutely no interest in the matter, only further emphasizing Canadian humiliation and helplessness. When the Canadian professionals lost their first game against the Soviets, the blame was, of course, placed firmly on the United States.

This trend of festering Canadian resentment against the U.S. bursting out into the open through hockey is what I am examining in this piece. Hockey games, like many sports, are a venue where the rules of self-expression are different from our day-to-day life. Beyond the players, who frequently get into sanctioned fistfights on the ice, spectators also feel more freedom to express their already heightened emotions. People who are otherwise calm and measured will yell and scream, and the game takes on meanings much greater than the numbers on the scoreboard. For Canadians, hockey has become symbolic of the complicated entanglements between their country and their neighbors to the south.

Even during periods of lower tension, high-stakes ice hockey victories over the U.S. create massive swells of patriotism, like when Team Canada won the gold medal game during the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. John Vincent and Jane Crossman analyzed coverage of the team in The Globe and Mail, identifying different rhetorical themes of nationalism. Three of these myths are especially relevant here. First, the sense that the sport of hockey belonged to Canada, referred to over and over again as “our game.” Second, rhetoric emphasizing “the Canadian brand of hockey we all know,” a hypermasculine, tough, rugged, and violent style which signaled strength and virtue in the Canadian hockey mindset. The third theme tied young star Sidney Crosby’s final game-winning goal to “The Shot Heard Around the World,” referencing Paul Henderson’s goal which won Canada the 1972 Summit Series. Nationalist mythmaking elevates players who score in high-stakes situations to the status of folk hero; what is now referred to as Sidney Crosby’s ‘golden goal’ still persists in Canadian popular culture to this day. 

These three rhetorical myths reared their heads again during the NHL’s 2025 4 Nations Face-off, when best-on-best international competition returned for the first time since the 2014 Sochi Olympics.

Set in mid-February 2025 as a replacement for the All-Star Game, the tournament was just in time to coincide with flaring tensions between the U.S. and Canada (causing the other two teams, Sweden and Finland, to sink into the background in comparison). Trump announced his intentions to place 25% tariffs on imports from Canada on February 1st, and Canadian shock and anger immediately made itself known. Canadian fans began booing the “Star Spangled Banner” whenever American NHL teams came to town. This was only amplified by Trump’s repeated comments about making Canada the U.S.’s “51st state.”

The Canadian backlash against these acts of aggression was severe. Canadians began boycotting American goods in grocery stores in favor of Canadian brands and changing their vacation destinations from Florida and New York to Quebec or the Maritimes. Canadian brands capitalized on the hype and played up their Canadian allegiance as well, like with Pizza Pizza’s 25% off Reverse Tariff deal. But the most prevalent slogan to come out of the political backlash was predictably tied to hockey: “Elbows up.” The figure of speech evokes the memory of the late Canadian hockey legend Gordie Howe, who was known as both Mr. Hockey and Mr. Elbows, and again, frames Canadian hockey as tough and fierce. Outgoing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau explained, “We’re a country that will be diplomatic when we can, but fight when we must. Elbows up!” These protests were only just emerging in mid-February, but set the scene well for the 4 Nations Face-Off.

In their preliminary contest, Team USA beat Team Canada in a rough game that saw three fights in the first 9 seconds of play. But with both teams qualifying for the final, the rematch was set, and both teams’ approaches were steeped in historical legacy and nationalism.

Team USA had dinner with the 1980 Men’s Olympic ice hockey team, the amateurs responsible for a legendary upset victory over the Soviets known as the Miracle on Ice. Not content with invoking only the past, Team USA’s General Manager Bill Guerin publicly invited Trump to the final, stating, “We have a room full of proud American players and coaches and staff.” Trump did not attend, but spoke to the team over a phone call the morning of the final and posted about the game on Truth Social, saying that he’d be watching, “and if Governor Trudeau would like to join us, he would be most welcome,” once again referring to his hypothetical annexation of Canada. Individual players mostly tried to avoid the politics, instead playing up the historic rivalry in their comments to the media.

Team Canada also engaged with nationalist rhetoric. Throughout the tournament, Team Canada coach John Cooper reiterated that the team should play “our way, boys, the right way, the Canadian way.” Before the final, he also encouraged the team to “go make our country proud,” and before overtime, told them, “[if] you get a chance to shoot it in the net, you shoot it in the [censored] net, alright? Be a Canadian hero.” Cooper’s rhetoric used the same themes as the media coverage of the 2010 Olympics, spotlighting Canada’s physical style of play and setting the stage for the mythmaking potential of another golden goal.

Canada did get another golden goal, passing down the torch of the Canadian hockey hero from Sidney Crosby to Connor McDavid, and Canada celebrated. Trudeau posted on X, “You can’t take our country – and you can’t take our game.” This evoked another one of the themes in the 2010 media coverage: an assertion of Canadian ownership of the game of ice hockey. With all three of these rhetorical patterns present, hockey had once again become a stage upon which Canadian nationalism, and anti-Americanism, could be affirmed. The victory on the ice was symbolic of the rugged perseverance which is a cornerstone of the Canadian national identity, especially in resistance to the creeping cultural, economic, and now political imperialism of the United States.

Appreciating the event in context of the political legacy of Canadian ice hockey allows us to understand why the sport can capture so much meaning. The men playing the national game became surrogates for the anger of Canadians in the face of American aggression. And the timing was perfect, allowing Team Canada to symbolically reassert its strength, crown a new national hockey hero, and reclaim its national game. Even the NHL’s documentary covering the tournament, which excluded any and all mentions of Trump, tariffs, or a 51st state, had to acknowledge that Canada’s win was “a victory that united a nation at just the right time.”

Further Reading:

• If you like reading about how people use culture and rhetoric to build national identities, read this paper I wrote a few years ago about the construction of the Turkish national identity. It won the 2023 Mohamed El Beih Paper Prize for best undergraduate paper in USC’s Middle East Studies Department.

• Though none of his papers are available as open access online, I’d still like to thank John Soares, adjunct assistant professor of history at Notre Dame University. His paper “‘Our way of life against theirs’: Ice hockey and the cold war” was one of the first sports politics papers I read last summer. It directly inspired this deep dive and undoubtedly set me on the path I am on now. If you have any institutional access, I’d highly recommend his work!

• Or if you want something totally different, check out the first episode of the podcast I’ve been making with the Wende Museum and Thomas Mann House! Dani Taylor and I interview Lynne Thompson, the fourth poet laureate of Los Angeles. It’s available on Spotify or Apple Music.