There was a time when representing your country at the Olympics meant something — when athletes carried themselves with dignity, grateful for the extraordinary privilege of competing on the world’s biggest stage. That time, apparently, is over. Freestyle skier Gus Kenworthy, who once won a silver medal for the United States before ditching Team USA for Great Britain, decided the best way to make a political statement ahead of the Milan Cortina Winter Games was to urinate a profane anti-ICE message in the snow and post it to his 1.2 million Instagram followers. If you ever wanted a perfect snapshot of where the modern left’s idea of “resistance” has landed, look no further than a grown man proudly photographing his own bodily waste.
Let’s set aside for a moment the sheer juvenile absurdity of the act — which Kenworthy himself acknowledged, joking about being “a child” — and focus on the substance, or rather, the complete lack of it. ICE exists to enforce the immigration laws passed by Congress and signed by presidents of both parties. The agency’s operations in places like Minneapolis have drawn scrutiny, sure, but calling federal law enforcement murderers while providing your followers a handy script to call their senators isn’t brave commentary. It’s performative activism at its most lazy, wrapped in literal toilet humor. Kenworthy offered no policy solutions, no nuance, no acknowledgment that a nation has a right to secure borders. Just obscenity scrawled in urine.
What’s particularly galling is that this is a man who abandoned Team USA to ski for Britain, and yet still feels entitled to lecture Americans on domestic policy from the comfort of an Italian ski resort. He couldn’t even be bothered to compete under the flag of the country whose politics he so desperately wants to influence. The IOC, predictably, shrugged it off, saying they don’t regulate personal social media posts. One imagines the response might be slightly different if an athlete had written something supportive of border enforcement in the snow — but that double standard is baked into the cake at this point.
The fawning media coverage tells you everything you need to know. HuffPost treated Kenworthy like a folk hero, complete with cutesy alliterative headlines. The left loves this kind of stunt because it requires zero intellectual rigor and maximum shock value. But to most Americans — the ones who actually want immigration laws enforced and who still believe the Olympics should be about athletic excellence rather than political tantrums — Kenworthy didn’t deliver a brave message. He just made a mess.