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Associated Press gripes about the Winter Olympics being too white

February 7, 2026 | | Print Article

The Associated Press (AP) is upset that the majority-white European nations competing in the Winter Olympics don’t have enough, if any, black migrants on their teams.

According to AP reporter Steve Douglas, the need for so-called diversity (a code word for more black people) on the teams is imperative because otherwise black people won’t be motivated to learn how to ski, snowboard, etc.

As proof, he cites the case of Maryan Hashi, a black Somali woman living in Sweden who now likes to snowboard but was initially afraid to try because of all the white people.

“When you don’t have information or access or nobody around you does it — snowboarding is basically a white sport — and when you’re not correctly integrated into the community, you don’t know much about it,” she complained to the AP.

“Am I wearing the correct clothing for this? Does it fit? Do I look weird? Am I snowboarding correctly? Do they think it’s weird I’m on the slope?” she added.

Douglas, the author of the report, went on to grumble and moan that despite all the recent migration from Africa and the Middle East to Europe changing “the demographics of [the continent] in recent decades,” this “growing diversity” isn’t reflected in countries’ Olympic teams.

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“At the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics, Sweden is sending a team made up almost exclusively of ethnically Swedish athletes, with NHL player Mika Zibanejad, whose father is from Iran, a rare exception,” Douglas whines.

“That hardly reflects the diversity of the Nordic country: About 2 million of its 10 million residents were born abroad, about half of them in Asia or Africa, according to national statistics agency SCB,” his whining continues.

Similarly, he protests, the “Olympic rosters of France, Germany, Switzerland and other European winter sports nations look a lot like Sweden’s: overwhelmingly white and lacking the immigrant representation seen in their soccer or basketball teams.”

Douglas also quotes a Umea University sports pedagogy professor, Josef Fahlen, who alleged that the supposed lack of diversity (or black people) is not a “winter sports problem but a cultural issue” that needs to be fixed.

Fahlen warned, however, that the sort of “cultural shift” needed to make mostly white sports become “diverse”takes “not years, but decades.”

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Critics have pushed back hard on the AP’s race-baiting by noting, among other things, how the paper doesn’t have a problem with how black people are grossly overrepresented in the NBA and NFL.

Critics have also questioned the purpose of the Olympics, “if every individual country already has a globally diverse population.”

Look (*Language warning):

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Vivek Saxena
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