At the opening of the 2026 Winter Olympics, held simultaneously at venues in Milan, Cortina, Livigno, and Predazzo, the notion of the games as an occasion for international peace took the form of armonia, or “harmony” in Italian. It was a quality exhibited more convincingly in the ceremony’s fusion of disparate parts than in its relentless message of collectivism. Yet even before American and Israeli leaders, not quite a week after the close of the games, launched a joint offensive on Iran, these Olympics were among the most fraught since the end of World War II. Certainly none have been so troubled since the American boycott of the 1980 summer games in Moscow—followed by the Russians’ boycott of the Los Angeles games four years later. It’s been nearly two months since the Italian games concluded, but their suggestion of internationalism feels even more distant now, so thoroughly have Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, Pete Hegseth, and others eroded any foundation for even a fantasy of armonia.

During the original Olympic Games in the eighth century BC, the various city-states of Greece would agree to suspend all hostilities so as to ensure the safe passage of both spectators and athletes to Olympia. This was known as ekcheria—“a staying of the hand”—and established the “Olympic Truce,” the concept that peace, albeit temporary, could be achieved through the common purpose of sport. In the summer of 1894, when the French aristocrat Pierre de Coubertin convened seventy-eight delegates from nine different nations at the Sorbonne to discuss the reinstitution of the games, his efforts were animated, at least partly, by this ideal of international harmony. To reach it, he asked, “what better means is there than to bring the youth of all countries periodically together for amicable trials of muscular strength and agility?” 

Nearly a hundred years later, against the backdrop of war in Yugoslavia and the Persian Gulf, the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the governing body resulting from that summit at the Sorbonne, renewed the call for participant nations to suspend military conflict during the games. There have been no small number of violations—the US’s operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, which continued throughout the 2004 Games; the 2008 Russian invasion of Georgia, to name only two—but the Olympics as a gesture toward global accord has abided as at least a shibboleth, if not a mandate.

At the 2026 Opening Ceremonies, the internationalist vision of the Olympics reached its fullest expression during the customary Parade of Nations, when viewers are introduced to the 2,900 athletes representing over ninety countries. This year’s procession was marked by a particular spirit of excess. Each delegation, from the 232 American athletes to the single alpine skier representing the Republic of Guinea-Bissau, was escorted by placard-bearers wearing floor-length puffer coats that wouldn’t have seemed out of place on The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City. Here, the athletes were surrogates in a colorful show of Panhellenic comity, trotted out as avatars of national pride—the Mongolians in native cashmere, the Saudis in bisht-inspired cloaks. There was pageantry enough for an international audience, though in the States it was mediated by the typically goofy ministrations of network television. “At the Torino Olympics, they nicknamed me the Flying Tomato,” the snowboarder and three-time gold medalist Shaun White told NBC. “Out here they call it the pomodoro.” Cut to Cortina, 160 miles north, where special correspondent Snoop Dogg was holding court with members of the Jamaican bobsled team.

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Through the effusion of pomp, one might have missed any intimation of what was to come. In retrospect, however, the games revealed the tenuous state of global affairs, and the futility of the IOC’s call for unity, on the brink of Operation Epic Fury.

Nowhere was this more evident than NBC’s commentary during the Parade of Nations. Gesturing toward politics only in broad strokes, the network’s announcers maintained the illusion that Olympic sport could be an antidote to global unrest while revealing the double standards of the IOC’s inconsistent jurisdiction. The entrance of the four Iranian Olympians in Milan, for example, following so soon after their government’s lethal crackdown on civilian protesters, prompted a predictable mention of “escalating tensions” between the regime and the United States. And when the ten athletes representing Israel made their way through the ring-shaped proscenium, the sportscaster Terry Gannon remarked soberly but unspecifically on “the ongoing conflict in Gaza” before pivoting to the murder of eleven Israelis at the 1972 Munich Games. 

Unmentioned was the absence of any athletes from Palestine (it’s had its own Olympic Committee since 1993), which didn’t send any, though eight competed at the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris. Excluded from the festivities were the thirteen Russians and seven Belarusians who’d traveled to Italy as “Individual Neutral Athletes,” per the cumbersome designation the IOC accords competitors from countries that have not been invited—a highly discretionary decision—due to their ongoing militarism.

The arrival of the American Olympians, during which NBC betrayed nothing of the international tumult already wrought by its government, was the broadcast’s watershed. The team, wearing snow-white outerwear by Ralph Lauren, received warm welcomes at San Siro Stadium and the satellite ceremonies up north. But a chorus of boos could be heard on television when the cameras panned to the stands and found J.D. Vance, who didn’t so much wave his tiny American flag as rattle it. The next day Vance’s elaborate motorcade of Chevy Suburbans nearly caused the American Alysa Liu to miss her skate in the women’s short program, offering a convenient metaphor for the self-abasing state of American politics.

For all their pretense as a kind of diplomatic theater, this winter’s games were, as usual, best enjoyed as a celebration of individual accomplishment. You could hardly watch the German ski jumper Philipp Raimund overcome his ironic fear of heights to win gold, or Mikaela Shiffrin, whose father died unexpectedly in 2020, tell NBC’s Mike Tirico about skiing through grief, and not feel some renewed belief in the human spirit. Before work I got in the habit of watching NBC’s early morning coverage of curling, an event whose quiet rhythms helped usher in the day. One of the most delightful things about each Olympic cycle is the swift elevation of mostly obscure athletes to the status of national icons—in this case, the American duo of Cory Thiesse and Korey Dropkin, whose rapport was so endearing they seemed like soulmates as much as curling partners. Before the pair competed, Peacock ran segments recounting their origin story: Dropkin asked Thiesse to be his mixed doubles partner four years earlier over drinks at a Minnesota pub owned by—who else?—retired national champion curlers.

At their best, the Olympics are filled with these kinds of stories of serendipity and dedication, of mastery and fulfillment. But by day two, when four-time Olympian skier Lindsey Vonn competed in the downhill event on a recently ruptured ACL, the fairy tale was punctured. Vonn, forty-one years old, clipped a gate thirteen seconds into her run, careening down the mountain before crash-landing in the snow. Then came the unexpected defeat of the “Quad God,” Ilia Malinin, the figure skater known for executing acrobatics previously unseen in the sport, who traveled to Milan having not lost an international competition in over two years. In the free skate Malinin bailed on his trademark move, the vaunted quad axel, and fell twice. The broadcast, which had clearly prepared for the twenty-one-year-old’s coronation, ground to a halt. That he then regained his composure for an interview with NBC was itself a small miracle. “It’s not like any other competition,” he said, his forehead still damp with sweat. “It’s the Olympics.”

And then there was Liu, who greeted the magnitude of the occasion with infectious joy. By the time she took the ice for her free skate, her story had been recounted often enough by network commentators that it had become an impressive parable of autonomy. The twenty-year-old Liu, raised in the Bay Area by her father, who fled China after the Tiananmen Square massacre, had retired from skating at sixteen and returned, in 2024, with renewed conviction and a determination to call her own shots.

But no narrative could have prepared viewers for her gold medal–winning free skate, a demonstration of freedom so vital and propulsive as to appear almost improvised. Skating to Donna Summer’s “MacArthur Park Suite,” Liu hardly stopped smiling, embodying at once the care of a technician and the lightness of an artist, or even a child. An anime enthusiast with two-toned hair, she seemed to suggest a different kind of athlete, one not hardened by the quest for greatness but enlivened by it. 

Against the backdrop of these superhuman feats was the bizarro psychodrama of athletic competition. It took only a week, according to the Italian outlet La Stampa, for the ten thousand condoms distributed to athletes in the Olympic Village to run out. A fugitive, on the run from the Italian carabinieri for sixteen years, was arrested in Milan, where he’d gone to cheer on the Slovakian ice hockey team. Viewers were taken, too, by the viral case of Norwegian biathlete Sturla Holm Laegreid, who after earning a bronze medal in the twenty-kilometer event tearfully pleaded for forgiveness from an ex-girlfriend he confessed, unprompted, to having cheated on. Another biathlete, found guilty several months earlier of spending €2,000 on her teammate’s credit card, won gold in the fifteen-kilometer individual race. The woman she stole from finished eightieth.

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But however subordinated they were to this sort of drama, politics were never entirely out of view. Some of the American athletes remarked cautiously on the state of our union: the freestyle skier Hunter Hess expressed “mixed emotions” about representing the United States, prompting Donald Trump to call him a “loser,” while Shiffrin quoted Nelson Mandela—“peace is not just the absence of conflict; peace is the creation of an environment where all can flourish”—when asked for her feelings about competing under the American flag. 

More provocatively, Gus Kenworthy, the skier who used to compete for the US and now represents Great Britain, caused a fuss two days before the games began for inscribing his feelings about ICE on a snowdrift with his urine. The federal agency’s presence at the games—they had been deployed as “security” for the American team—had been rebuked by the mayor of Milan as well as the leader of Italy’s Democratic Party, Ellie Schlein. ICE, she said, “is not respecting the law on American soil, so there is concern that they would not respect them on Italian soil either.”

Other athletes found themselves unwittingly converted into objects of political utility. Liu was embraced by the online left as an eccentric Gen-Z icon, proudly woke and openly queer, embodying the virtues of a multiculturalism currently under siege. The right claimed her as an exemplar of patriotic sentiment because she’d spurned recruitment attempts by the Chinese government and opted instead to compete under the American flag. The day after Liu’s free skate, Senator Ted Cruz could be found reposting tweets by conservative pundits positioning her as the flag-waving antidote to the gold medal–winning Chinese American skier Eileen Gu, who grew up in San Francisco, a bridge away from Liu, but has represented China since the age of fifteen. Making one last foray into the Olympic conversation, Vice President Vance told Fox News that any athlete “who benefited from our education system, from the freedoms and liberties that make this country a great place,” should compete for the US.

For all its humanitarian ambitions, the International Olympic Committee’s calls for peace and harmony were ultimately rendered meaningless by the time the US and Israel began their joint offensive in Iran. The Olympic Truce, said the committee just days after the initial airstrikes and right before the start of the Paralympic Games, is an “aspirational and non-binding resolution,” an expression of principles that is ultimately unenforceable if not entirely symbolic. But one need only return to the committee’s considerably more disapproving response to the invasion of Ukraine four years ago, resulting in immediate sanctions and the suspension of athletes from Russia and Belarus, to understand the fundamental superficiality of its stated mission. How, one wonders, could a committee that enforces its standards so inconsistently be expected to incentivize countries to obey international law?

Just before Trump and his cabinet took the country to war, the administration seemed eager to insert itself into more legitimate demonstrations of American supremacy. As the American men’s hockey team celebrated their gold medal—surely the president appreciated the warrior-like image of the team’s center, twenty-four-year-old Jack Hughes, smiling wide with a missing front tooth—FBI Director Kash Patel joined them in the clubhouse, rounding out his taxpayer-funded trip to Milan by chugging beers and pounding his chest like a fraternity recruit. Patel, a former amateur hockey player, clearly relished his admission into the boys club. He took it one step further and called up his boss, who joked about how he’d be impeached if he didn’t extend the customary White House invitation to the American women’s team, who had won a gold medal of their own just a day earlier. To this commander-in-chief, these two American success stories simply provided fodder for a misogynist dig, the athletes just toy soldiers in an endless culture war.

In the days following its attacks on Iran, the White House, unable to put forth a justification for the war beyond a desire to demonstrate the unprecedented potency of the American military, posted a series of fancam-style videos on social media, leveraging the frenetic visual language of the Internet in support of its military efforts abroad. One, accompanied by text that read “Pure American Dominance,” featured clips of Major League Baseball legends like Barry Bonds, Ken Griffey Jr., Alex Rodriguez, and Sammy Sosa hitting pitches, interspliced with footage of explosions at unspecified sites the moment each player makes contact with the ball. Another, set to “Thunderstruck” by AC/DC, shows some of the NFL’s most fearsome tacklers—Ray Lewis, Ryan Clark—trucking opposing players, with more combat footage mixed in at the point of collision. “We’re over here just grinding away on banger memes, dude,” an anonymous senior White House official told Politico of the administration’s social media strategy. “There’s an entertainment factor to what we do.” 

The rules of engagement once dictated that our government officials treat war with a gravitas commensurate to its catastrophic consequences. In the breakdown of those rules, one can see the erosion, too, of the quaint idea that the Olympics might provide a model of international concord. So much for “amicable trials of muscular strength and agility.” Here was Operation Epic Fury, just another theater for the expression of American power.