Hilary Knight, the captain of the US girls’s ice hockey group, has responded to feedback made by Donald Trump after the Individuals gained gold on the Winter Olympics, calling the president’s quip a “distasteful joke”.
After the US males’s ice hockey group gained gold on Sunday, Trump known as into the locker-room celebration and invited the gamers to be his visitors at Tuesday’s State of the Union tackle.
“I have to let you know, we’re going to need to carry the ladies’s group,” he mentioned. “You do know that. I do consider I in all probability can be impeached [if the women’s team wasn’t invited].” A number of of the lads’s gamers had been captured laughing at Trump’s feedback in a video that later went viral.
Knight, a five-time Olympic medalist who is without doubt one of the most adorned gamers in girls’s ice hockey historical past, addressed Trump’s remarks on Wednesday in an look on SportsCenter.
“I believed it was form of a distasteful joke and sadly that’s overshadowing a whole lot of the success, the success of simply girls on the Olympics carrying for Staff USA and having superb gold medal feats.
“We’re simply specializing in celebrating the ladies in our room, the extraordinary efforts, and proceed to rejoice three gold medals in program historical past in addition to the double gold for each males’s and girls’s on the similar time. And actually not detract from that with a distasteful joke.”
Trump’s feedback and the response of the lads’s gamers sparked a backlash within the days for the reason that gold medal wins. Jack Hughes, who scored the game-winning objective within the males’s additional time win over Canada, tried to quell a number of the response in a Good Morning America look on Tuesday.
“Individuals are so adverse about issues,” he mentioned. “I feel everybody in that locker room is aware of how a lot we assist [the women’s team], how proud we’re of them. The identical approach we really feel about them, they really feel about us.”
Knight instructed SportsCenter the assist and respect between the lads’s and girls’s groups had been overshadowed by the controversy.
“I feel the fellows had been in a troublesome spot, so I feel it’s a disgrace this storyline and narrative has type of blown up and overshadowing that connection and real curiosity in each other and cheering one another on,” she mentioned.
Kelly Pannek, a two-time gold medalist who had two assists for the US on the Olympics, echoed Knight.
“Everyone knows being there what it felt wish to have [the men’s team’s] assist all through the event, to assist them and the way nice of a second it was for everybody that was a fan of each groups,” Pannek instructed reporters Wednesday at a Minnesota Frost media availability. “The cellphone name particularly, it’s not stunning, to be frank. I don’t know why we’d anticipate otherwise.”
Requested on Wednesday concerning the response to the locker-room movies, US goaltender Jeremy Swayman instructed reporters, “We must always’ve reacted otherwise.”
“We all know that we’re so excited for the ladies’s group, we’ve a lot respect for the ladies’s group,” mentioned Swayman, who performs for the Boston Bruins. “To share that gold medal with them is one thing that we’re eternally grateful for.”
Twenty members of the lads’s group, coming off their first Olympic gold since 1980, visited the White Home on Tuesday and attended the State of the Union later that evening. The ladies’s group, who defeated Canada to win their third gold medal since girls’s hockey was added to the Video games in 1998, declined an invite, citing “timing and beforehand scheduled tutorial {and professional} commitments”.
Trump mentioned throughout his speech that the ladies’s group would go to the Oval Workplace “quickly”, however USA Hockey has not confirmed any plans.
Knight, 36, had three objectives and three assists in seven video games on the Milano Cortina Olympics, which she mentioned can be the final of her storied profession. She has probably the most Olympic objectives (15) and factors (33) of any male or feminine American hockey participant.
“I feel it is a actually good studying level to give attention to how we speak about girls, not solely in sport however in business,” she mentioned Wednesday. “Ladies aren’t lower than. Our achievements shouldn’t be overshadowed by the rest aside from how nice they’re.”
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