The tension is so thick you can almost cut it with a knife. A sold-out stadium helplessly watches in overtime. Almost unable to keep up with the speed of the play, the announcer stutters, “Waiting … Connor McDavid…” The puck glides, his stick winds; it flexes. The stadium goes dead silent as 21,000 fans all hold their breaths in unison. Then, SLAP! In the blink of an eye, the puck slices through the air. “Connor McDavid…” the announcer continues. The puck whizzes by one defender, then another. The goalie reaches blindly. “Connor McDavid … SCORES! Connor McDavid wins it for Canada!” The stadium erupts as the announcer, fully drowned out by the deafening noise of the audience, finishes his play-by-play. The week-long Four Nations tournament is finally over, and Canada is going home with the championship trophy.
The collective sigh of relief that Canada released after the recent Four Nations Face-Off victory highlights how significant this specific game was. Played during the tense geopolitical reality of strained Canada-U.S. relations, the game was not only a historic sports event but also held political symbolism as well.
With U.S. President Donald Trump spewing divisive rhetoric, levying various threats, and imposing economic tariffs, many Canadians feel dismayed — so this decisive win on the ice feels like a political victory as well.
Even before the championship round, the game was politically heated. In the two games the U.S. played against Finland and Canada at the Bell Centre in Montreal on February 13 and 15, spectators booed the American national anthem. In the game against Canada where this happened, the American players immediately responded by initiating four separate fights on the ice within the first nine seconds of the game. While this was largely a performative move to entertain emotional Canadian fans, it speaks to a deeper phenomenon of politics infiltrating sports. The visual appearance of the fights, with one jersey bearing the U.S. flag and the other the Canadian flag, shadowed the image of combatants in opposing uniforms confronting one another. It brings a physical dimension to the current political narrative of the Canada-U.S. conflict, which for now has remained mostly verbal.
This issue of sports becoming politically charged is nothing new. In fact, the stage of a sporting function serves as the perfect platform for political advertising, whether through protest, propaganda, or any other means of expression. Sporting events, especially those carried out in large venues, congregate enormous crowds of people who political actors can address and potentially influence. Mobilizing such large groups of people can be a costly logistical challenge; infiltrating an existing assembly is more efficient, even if politics holds little to no relevance to the function. What matters is the mass of impressionable ears in attendance.
Political infiltration can pose a plethora of problems, and I personally find it an extreme irritant. Fundamentally, sports leagues are critical agents of civil society that unify people from all walks of life around a shared common interest: a passion for sports. This includes people who hold different religious convictions, political beliefs, and social opinions. Allowing politics into this space can have the opposite effect, sowing division and conflict rather than unity and collaboration. For this reason, I believe that politics should be left out of sports altogether, and political activists, regardless of what they are championing, should not be allowed to hijack sports gatherings.
This is not to say that individual athletes should be censored from expressing their personal beliefs or political opinions, as that is their fundamental right. Rather, I argue that others should not exploit their craft to spread a political message. For instance, returning to the Canada-U.S. matchup in the Four-Nations tournament, both teams had the political stresses of their respective nations placed on them, when, in reality, they probably just wanted to get out on the ice and play some good hockey.
The recent research on “football hooliganism” and the far-right influence of football fan clubs in Europe provides a clear image of how politics can destroy sporting environments. Many of these far-right fan clubs, often composed of young, reckless men, simply seek to stir up trouble by spewing racist rhetoric and instigating violence at games. For them, soccer stadiums become a battleground where they can spread their ideology. However, this is not merely a far-right issue. For instance, in their book Fan Culture in European Football and the Influence of Left Wing Ideology, sports researchers David and Peter Kennedy highlight the far left’s use of soccer infrastructure to advocate their ideological convictions. In either case, politics steals attention from the athletes and ultimately threatens the unifying nature of sports.
Similarly, there is a tendency for authoritarian regimes to steal the limelight from major sports gatherings to draw attention to themselves. For instance, political scientists from the realist school of thought would argue that hosting global assemblies like the Olympics allows states to garner global prestige by positively advertising themselves to the world regardless of human rights violations. Most blatantly, the 1936 Summer Olympic Games held in Berlin were hijacked by Hitler to spread Nazi propaganda while his concentration camps hid behind the shadows of the Olympic stadium. Political actors rely on major sporting events — especially those with a global reach — to distract the general public from their harmful policies.
Today, we see an eerily similar pattern of behaviour from President Trump. In February, he made headlines for being the first sitting president to attend the Super Bowl. Just a few days later, the presidential motorcade drove laps around the Daytona 500 track before the actual NASCAR race began. During his campaign in June 2024, Trump visited the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) 302, where he immediately became the centre of attention. Then again, after winning the election, he returned for UFC 309 in Madison Square Garden, where he had an elaborate video tribute tantamount to political propaganda played for him on the jumbotron. In all fairness, Trump was well-known as a sports enthusiast long before he entered the political sphere, so these grandiose excursions aren’t out of character. Nonetheless, we should be wary of political meddling in our sports and entertainment industries.
The Four Nations Face-Off, wherein the geopolitical tensions between Canada and the US influenced the atmosphere and conduct of the games, was ultimately a testament to why we must ensure sports settings are apolitical. Sports is a venue for uniting people, not a platform to sow division. Amidst the politically charged context of US-Canada relations, the Four Nations tournament was an excellent opportunity for Canadians and Americans to unite around their mutual love of hockey. Moving forward, regardless of our political landscape, let’s resist political actors that seek to sow division and instead embrace opportunities to unite.