The best horse and the best rider win the rodeo
unless the rider has opinions
Cowboys Jake and Hunter were mucking our stables. They were having some fun while they were at it. Then, cowboy Brock from Bar-U-Six walked in. He’s a cowboy too, so he did not enter the unmucked areas. He was angry, though. At first, I didn’t know why. I soon enough found out, when they had gotten past the initial round of kumbaya.
“Ya got qualified for the rodeo, Brock?” Jake asked, knowing that Brock had competed and almost won last year.
“Sure enough,” Brock replied, “but they won’t have me on the roster anyway.”
Jake and Hunter’s facial expression said everything there was to know. They didn’t have to fish for the reason. Brock was excited enough to add it right away.
“My bareback riding passed the test well enough, I had three straight runs above 80. A few days after the qualification runs were done, though, I got an e-mail that said that my online comments made me unacceptable for the race. I didn’t post anything a normal guy would disagree with, just some plain obvious stuff. For instance, I posted that the competitions are naturally split into cowboy and a cowgirl disciplines and that dudes have no business trying to do barrel racing, even the ones that wear a skirt.”
~~~
Rodeo may be one of the last sports disciplines that recognizes differences between sexes and rates competitors based on their performance†. May it stay that way. Other sports are increasingly pressured, though, to only allow those athletes to compete who toe the political line.
Recently, the United States won the Olympic hockey tournament. That was a heroic victory and a first time since the legendary 1980 games in Lake Placid, NY. In those games, the US snapped the gold medal from the Soviet Union. Having won the previous five Olympic titles, the Soviet Union had been very much the favorite to win and the US’s victory was considered a “miracle on ice.”
As much as some would have liked to see a rematch, in present circumstances that would have been pretty impossible. The Soviet Union has fallen apart due to bad governance. It sure has. Yet its successor Russia was not allowed to compete either. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has barred both Russia and Belarus from competing as a country in any Olympic games, apparently as a “sanction” for their invasion of Ukraine, which “violated the Olympic Truce.” Sure, the Russian military campaign in Eastern Ukraine has cost thousands of lives and does not merit applause. However, it is far from the only armed conflict on the planet and even less so in the history of the Olympic Games. Website conflict.sbs tracks forty-six ongoing armed conflicts. The International Olympic Committee may want to explain how forty-five of those do not end up “violating the Olympic Truce,” while the forty-sixth does?
Some nations thought to be “failed nations,” with malignant governments, were allowed to compete. In spite of fueling several regional conflicts and terrorist organizations, being close to finishing nuclear weapons and openly having stated that the ultimate destruction of Israel is its goal, Iran was allowed to compete. Likewise, the kleptocratic regime of North Korea, which has posed a conventional military threat to millions in the Seoul area for decades, was allowed to compete. Back in 1980, the Soviet Union was way more powerful than present-day Russia. Still, it was allowed to compete. The longer one reflects about it, the more the question why exactly Russia is being excluded from Olympic events, becomes increasingly unanswerable. The case of Belarus is even more difficult to fathom, since it neither is at war with Ukraine, nor has invaded any territory.
Most will have noticed that no Russian teams competed. That holds true both for the 2024 summer and the 2026 winter games. However, it is striking just how far the sanctions went. The 2022 games still saw Russian teams compete, officially representing the “Russian Olympic Committee” instead of the country, so they were not allowed to use the Russian flag or anthem. In the 2024 and 2026 games, though, there were only and handful of Russians and Belarussians who participated as so-called “Individual Neutral Athletes.” Why were there so few of them? Well, at first “independent” athletes were not allowed to compete as a team. A team of Russians playing a match in white would still represent the to-be-banned Russian identity. Apparently, it is “offensive” to deny anybody’s self-proclaimed identity, except if that identity happens to be Russian.
Not only were Russian athletes not allowed to compete as a team, though. There were also very few white-flag solo athletes. In fact, a mere thirteen Russian and seven Belarussian nationals competed under the “neutral” flag. Why so? Well, to participate as an individual athlete, it didn’t suffice to meet the athletic bar and to temporarily give up one’s national identity. In order to be allowed in as an individual neutral athlete, athletes needed to be vetted … for their opinions and associations, on-line and off-line. Only athletes who had never been associated with the Russian or Belarussian military or state security and had never shown any support for the Russian military actions in Ukraine would be accepted.
At this point, let’s say that some athletes from other countries were very lucky not to be subjected to the same level of scrutiny. Iranian athletes were fortunate that their country’s support for Hamas, Hezbollah, and some militias in Iraq did not violate the Olympic Truce, in spite of those effectively occupying other countries’ territory. It surely would have been difficult to find Iranian athletes who opposed the ayatollah’s regime online, since even the ones who silently do so, fear repercussions for saying that in public. Chinese athletes should be thankful that the Chinese invasion and annexation of Tibet in 1951 never violated the Olympic Truce. They would have a hard time demonstrating that they support a free Tibet online. It is questionable if the ones that do support a free Tibet would have the temerity to post their opinions on WeChat, lest their digital wallet get frozen by the regime. The same holds for Russians, though. In the presence of a regime that tolerates almost no dissent, it is virtually impossible to survive as a prominent public figure that disavows the authorities. Yet that is what is expected of Russian athletes.
In spite of the IOC’s restrictions, we still saw a good Olympic hockey tournament. Matt Boldy and Jack Hughes scored in the finals to grab a gold medal for the United States. It would have been nice, though, if some time along the path to victory Matt Boldy had been able to play his Minnesota Wild teammate Kirill Kaprizov. Kaprizov would have been a member of a redoubtable adversary, along with players like Alex Ovechkin and Nikita Kucherov. Yet those NHL stars had apparently violated the Olympic Truce. No-one can explain how they did that, though. The one thing that Chinese, Iranian and Russian players have in common, is that they come from a totalitarian regime. Why one subset of players needs to be punished for having been born in the presence of a draconian government and another subset not, seems to be questionable. Wasn’t the Olympic spirit supposed to be about the ability to set one’s political differences apart for a few weeks and only compete on an athletic level?
The US had been allowed to participate as a team, in spite of their government having captured the sitting president of another country just a month before the games. Capturing a president must be an action that strengthens the Olympic Truce. The US had a great team, though, and won the gold medal. Yet Team USA’s great performance at men’s hockey did not exempt the players from being judged for their opinions. Right after the victory, President Donald Trump congratulated the US Men’s Hockey team. In the call, he invited them to the White House for the ceremony after his own State of the Union address. When the Men’s Hockey team accepted the invitation, President Trump joked that he would “have to” invite the Women’s team too, or else he’d be “impeached.” Some players on the Men’s team were visibly amused. That fact alone was enough to set off a media splat.
Unamused by the President’s joke, the Women’s Team declined the invitation to the White House, for “previously scheduled academic and professional commitments.” Sure, we all believe that that is the reason. But then they started opining that it was the Men’s Team’s moral obligation to do the same. The politically extremely biased mainstream media joined the choir to lambast the Men’s Team for accepting the invitation. We should all be happy they didn’t cave. To be invited in the White House as Olympic champions is a once-in-a-lifetime honour. It would have been insane if the Men’s Team had rejected the invitation, but then apparently having this opinion is deemed “unacceptable” by the media. Maybe Jack Hughes will have to scrub his White House pictures from the internet too if he wants to participate in the 2030 games. Even more so since his country has engaged in a war with Iran shortly after the 2026 Winter Games. It remains to be seen, though, whether that is a conflict that violates, or one that strengthens the Olympic Truce. Only the IOC can tell.
Many will also think that the speech controls imposed on Russian athletes will never be deployed to others. However, that is a fallacious thought process. Once the example has been set, it is a slippery slope and what was once an exception, may soon become the rule. We have all witnessed that with the COVID-19 pandemic. Censoring expert medical voices was considered taboo prior to 2020. Nor was there ever a sound reason to deem it acceptable afterwards. Yet censoring the internet of all sorts of opinions has become everyday practice in big tech and even a legal requirement some regions. Since the practice of selecting Russian athletes for the correctness of their opinions has been adopted, there already have been calls to ban athletes from other countries for wrongthink. A Swiss broadcaster has called for banning an Israeli bobsled athlete for his Zionist views. Fortunately, the news station took that video down due to outcry. But let’s imagine, though, what would have happened if those calls had gained traction. If the IOC had considered Israel’s presence in the West Bank and Gaza a “violation of the Olympic Truce,” it would only allow Israeli athletes without ties to the military or security forces. Since Israel has a three-year general conscription, virtually every citizen has ties to the military, so the IOC would effectively ban all Israeli athletes.
Based on all of the above, it is time to change course. Athletes are humans too. They don’t all have the same opinion. To realize that an athlete population is just as diverse as an average slice of the audience, makes sports leagues all the more relatable. Tennis reached peak popularity in the eighties. In those days, John McEnroe chided referees for making wrong calls. In today’s tennis, he would not win a single grand slam. Instead, he would be barred from competing for his language before he could ever get to the finals. For all the speech and conduct rules the tennis federations impose, the game has become very mechanical and dry to watch and the players have become difficult to relate to, since they are not allowed to show any of their true character. Wonder why many indoor tennis halls in North America are being converted into other uses?
Sports organizations have to refrain from constraining athletes’ speech. Quarterback Colin Kaepernick was virtually ousted from the National Football League for taking a knee during the National Anthem. He should not have been. His opinions may not be acceptable to all, but as long as he doesn’t disrupt the game, he should be allowed to express them. Conversely, Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker was blasted by the media for being “misogynistic.” As a devout Catholic, he said in a commencement speech that “his wife’s life “really started when she began living her vocation as a wife and as a mother.” He also stated that he “gained quite the reputation for speaking his mind” and that men should be “unapologetic in their masculinity, fighting against the cultural emasculation of men.” He is quite right there. Culture, society, the private sector and government all need a balance of masculine and feminine impulses. The overfeminization of government has gone much too far and, for instance, is part of the reason why the European Union finds itself in an impossible situation that ruins its own economy.
Leagues should not constrain opinions of their athletes. Therefore, they should definitely not engage in compelling their speech. However, that is what they seem to be doing. The same NFL that, fortunately, still tolerates characters like Harrison Butker, has been placing “social justice” slogans in the endzones for the last five years. That is, since the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots, they force teams to promote some of the same speech that Colin Kaepernick got ousted for just a few years earlier. Leagues should not end players’ careers for opinions, but, reflecting a diverse society, they should be neutral themselves.
In his commencement speech, Harrison Butker mentioned another prime example of compelled speech by sports leagues: “pride.” Sexual orientation is a private matter, but it is neither something to be proud of, nor something that others should “ally” with. Gay or trans flags have no place in any sports venue. Nor should any league have players parade in rainbow colours to demonstrate their “allyship.” Instead, leagues should invite players to say what they think of such events. Some of the woke media may not turn out to be pleased with what they hear.
~~~
A few days later, Brock returned triumphantly. “I’m back on the roster. I’ll kick their asses and show ‘em what I’m worth!” We were all happy to hear that. Our bucking horses wanted to hold Brock to his word too, you know. When we asked him what had changed, the answer was very simple. In solidarity with Brock, all other riders in his league had withdrawn from the rodeo. There are still morals out here.
One thing we can learn from all of this, is that sometimes the social justice warriors are right too. That is, when they say “it takes all of us.” For society to return to reason, it indeed takes all of us. And we all have to do our part.
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† In all fairness, while this post criticizes some of the IOC’s policies, the IOC also recently banned biological males from participating in female sports. A move long overdue, yet highly reasonable.