On Feb. 12, right-wing political commentator Matt Walsh posted a video to YouTube titled “The Only Olympic Sport Where Dad Bods Wins Gold.” In this video, Walsh makes a number of claims about the sport of curling, such as “If at the Olympic level, men and women can compete together, that is not a sport”, and that “If your sport can be played at the highest level by men with beer bellies, that is not a sport”. Walsh’s nine-minute rant may seem, at worst, uninformed and, at best, humorously aimed, but in reality, he speaks to the heart of the manosphere ideology that occupies so much space in sports and fitness. It should be taken seriously, as Walsh’s words represent a fast-approaching deluge of fascism in America.

First, it would be fruitful to describe what curling actually is, to serve as a counter-narrative to Walsh’s claims. It is important to note that in this video, Walsh admits he actually does not know the rules or the purpose of anything that is occurring on the ice. He remarks on the sport’s non-athleticism, amateurism and compares curling to bar games. Curling has been played since the early 1500’s and involves throwing stones across a 150-foot ice floor sprayed with water, then sweeping the frozen droplets away so the stone curls in the desired direction. The team with stones closer to the center circle, or button, wins and scores points according to the amount of stones closer to the center than their opponents’ nearest stone. The skip is the leader of the curling team, and calls the shots on how hard to sweep, where to sweep, and making sure the stone ends up where it needs to in order to score or knock an opponent’s stone away. It requires precision, strategy, and teamwork, but also strength and endurance to sweep and throw for 10 ends at the Olympic level. Walsh could not step on the rink and succeed today, despite his comparison to a bar’s hook and ring game. 

This is why Walsh’s defining aspects of a sport are completely illogical, and in fact point towards a right-wing ideology. Walsh would have you believe that to be an Olympian, you must have a visibly muscular body, but more importantly, a visibly masculine form and demeanor, and finally, that you are MALE. It offends Walsh’s worldview that some of the most prominent female curlers, like Joan McCusker, performed Olympic Gold feats while pregnant. It offends the manosphere that 2026 Olympic Gold winner Rasmus Wranå can maintain a peak physical form for his sport that does not result in 3% body fat percentage. 

Finally, Walsh fumes with one more central motivator. The United States did not win Gold. He does not say this in his video, but it is clear in how he insults the Swedish winners and mentions not the American Silver winners who stood right beside them. Certainly, he would not have felt so strongly that curling lacks legitimacy if the Americans succeeded in grabbing first. However, when he viewed Isabella Wranå, the leader of her team, yell in victory as her smart decision making allowed for Sweden to regain position and win 6-5, he felt insulted. Not only was the nationalist ego wounded, but by a woman vocally elated to win her first Olympic Gold, to which he compares to a “schizophrenic hobo”.  

Matt Walsh does not understand what makes the Olympics so great. The diversity of its participants, the overcoming of odds and the unity of two competitors giving it their all. What has infected his head is the toxic narrative that you must dominate, that you must achieve perfection, that you must fit the fascist idealized New Man. Curling, perhaps, serves as the perfect rejection of Walsh’s corruption of sports.