In a week when the news felt unbearable, I found myself clinging to something seemingly small and yet luminous: rooting for American figure skater Max Naumov to make the U.S. Olympic team. That flicker of hope arrived in the shadow of something devastating — the killing of Renee Good by an ICE agent in Minnesota and the divisive and horrifying debate that has followed. Holding those two realities together felt strange, even wrong. But it also felt necessary. Because loving this country right now means carrying grief and belief at the same time, and perhaps no other landscape makes space for such disparate feelings than sport.
The news about Good stopped me cold. A life lost, a family shattered, and yet another reminder of how power can turn lethal in an instant. Stories like this don’t just hurt. They destabilize, making us question, well, everything.
What I didn’t question was how much, how deeply, I suddenly cared about Max Naumov’s skate at U.S. Nationals in St. Louis.
The Olympics, of course, have long been on my dinner table -- from my first book to my work across numerous media platforms, researching, opining, cheering, pontificating. But Max’s story hits different. He isn’t just another talented athlete chasing Olympic dreams. He is the son of two elite figure skaters who died in last year’s tragic plane crash near Washington, D.C. that took 28 members of the U.S. skating community, the deadliest crash -- 67 people -- to take place on American soil in over two decades.
Watching Naumov take the ice in St. Louis, knowing what invisible burden he was carrying, felt almost sacred. Every jump he landed wasn’t just a technical feat or an artistic achievement -- it felt like a refusal to let enormous loss define his life. He skated under the weight of absence and the audacity of hope and we were there -- my whole family staring at the television, holding our collective breath -- cheering him on.
Rooting for him didn’t feel like an escape. It was grounding. Because in a week when America felt cruel, was cruel, Naumov embodied resilience without bitterness. Discipline without spectacle. Grief transformed into motion. There was something profoundly American about that — not in a flag-waving “USA-USA-USA” kind of way, but in a very human kind of way. The stubborn insistence on continuing, striving, and refusing to disappear.
It feels radical to experience joy right now, letting yourself care deeply about something good when so much feels broken. Watching Naumov sit in the kiss-and-cry waiting for his scores, clutching a photograph of his parents, tears brimming in his eyes (and my eyes), I felt connected — to fans in the seats cheering, to Tara and Johnny as they deftly told us what each move meant, to anyone who just wanted, needed, something to support in the most uncomplicated of ways. That collective energy mattered. It reminded me that community doesn’t only form around outrage. It can form around beauty, too.
Max showed us that we cannot live only in despair. If we do, we lose our capacity to imagine anything better.He didn’t choose his tragedy. But he did choose what to do with it. His choice — to keep showing up, to keep training, to keep believing in something ahead, to keep -- oh yes -- dreaming?It serves as a staunch reminder that people are still fighting for their futures, even when seemingly everything fails them.
So, we celebrate Max, applauding his individual survival in a moment of systemic collapse, taking strength from his ability to show up after unimaginable loss, and understanding that humans are capable of incredible things when they are supported, believed in, and protected. We deserve to have that kind of hope, to demand it, from ourselves, from each other, and from our country.And when Max takes to the ice in Milan, a member of the U.S. Olympic Skating Team, no one will be screaming more loudly for him than me.
Amy Bass is professor of sport studies and chair of the division of social science and communication at Manhattanville University. Bass is the author of ONE GOAL: A COACH, A TEAM, AND THE GAME THAT BROUGHT A DIVDED TOWN TOGETHER, among other titles. In 2012, she won an Emmy for her work with NBC Olympic Sports on the London Olympic Games.
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