🏒🏒🏒 Hockey Ehh 🏒🏒🏒

I am disappointed, but not surprised.

Seeing the men US hockey team so blatantly disrespect the women hockey players angered me so much. I was really struggling to think of why exactly. This locker room misogyny is sadly nothing new, so I didn’t understand why it caught me off guard so much.

But I think I get it now.

Firstly, I had no illusion about the overall mentality of the USA hockey players, but I thought at least some of them were NOT a full on MAGA. The Hughes brothers have a mum, who is an accomplished hockey player itself and to this day works with the women team. Also, Jack and Luke Hughes picked a book about black female athlete for their reading program for kids. I don’t know much about them (I don’t follow any hockey players social media accounts), but the few tidbits I learned were leaning towards neutrally liberal/progressive (totally my fault). So, when its clear the brothers are MAGA-leaning, what about the others? I don’t really want to know more about the male players now (I might be unfair to them, but at this point – few hours before the State of the Union – I am honestly not in the mood to give them benefit of the doubt). Basically, I lost the last bit of my rose-tinted glasses.

Secondly, and this is my main point, I know hockey is one of the toughest sports out there. Mentally and physically. The players that are lucky enough to make it to the NHL are honing their talent from a very young age. The time, energy and money needed to succeed in hockey, is honestly unreachable by most. One of the reasons I love hockey so much is because most of the players got to the place where they are even if their situation is not ideal – but they made it so. You hear stories about players whose parents had to borrow money for their equipment, or if they had only one parent, they needed to decide whether to seek better opportunities for themselves or getting their kid to the rink at 5 in the morning. They often moved to be closer to the rink, etc. What I mean to say – these men KNOW what is like to fight against “life” for a lack of a better word. So, to diminish the Olympic champions (who happened to be women) is so disappointing. I know that hard and honest work doesn’t equal a good person. But I hoped it did.

I'm Slovak and our country is in deep shit. Think MAGA but pro-Putin. Our prime minister just announced that we are freezing emergency electric power to Ukraine.... And people here are AGREEING with him. Just deplorable.

Also, at the helm of Hockey Slovakia is a pro-Russian board (they even let players who play in the KHL to represent, while other countries banned them). But people here like hockey, we managed to placed 4th at these Olympics.

Šimon Nemec (D for the New Jersey Devils) said in his interview after the bronze medal game (which Slovak team lost) that "Our country is in bad...times [some people speculate he wanted to say "hands", which would arguably fit better linguistically], so I'm glad we made our fans happy at least like this with hockey. Unfortunately, we didn't manage to get the medal today."