"The 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team did not have the option to just play a game. Several members of that squad have said that as they prepared to face the dominant Soviet team at Lake Placid, New York, they read a telegram from a woman in Texas who wrote only, "Beat those commie bastards." (Apocryphal or not, the story made its way into the 2004 Disney movie Miracle.)"
"In 1980, the Cold War was at its frostiest. In the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, President Jimmy Carter was whipping up international support for the coming boycott of that summer's games in Moscow. And domestically, the share of the American public that had an unfavorable general attitude toward communism as a system of government had gone from 36 percent in 1953 to 49 percent by February 1979. It soared to 73 percent by mid-1980."
"During those Winter Games, the U.S. government and America writ large were eager for a rally-around-the flag moment. The U.S. hockey team played its role perfectly. As a writer put it in the Toledo Blade, on Feb. 22, 1980, "The Soviet Union went down and the rumble out of the homes and bars and restaurants and clubs must have crept into the Kremlin.""
In 1980 the U.S. Olympic hockey victory carried Cold War significance, amplified by public anger after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and calls for a boycott of the Moscow Games. American anti-communist sentiment rose sharply, and the hockey win served as a rally-around-the-flag moment that resonated across the country. The Toledo Blade described the upset as a seismic event that reached even the Kremlin. Forty-six years later at the 2026 Milan Cortina Games, U.S. men's and women's hockey teams approach competition as strong contenders, with Canada as the principal rival for gold.
Read at Slate Magazine
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