Caitlin Clark’s political arc begins at the 2023 NCAA women’s basketball championship, a study in identity politics. On one side was her team, Iowa, standard bearers for white middle America. On the other was Louisiana State University (LSU), Black America’s team. When LSU went on to beat Iowa by double digits and win the most watched women’s college basketball contest to date, sympathy was quick to gather around the white phenom who had given her all in defeat – and it flowed straight from the top. “You know,” Jill Biden said after the game, “I’m going to tell Joe that I think Iowa should come too because they played such a good game.”

The first lady’s comments, besides raising a national debate around race, were yet more evidence of how the American athlete has become not just a Rorschach test for politics, but also a giant funhouse mirror for our never-ending discourses and polarizing disagreements. During an election year in which fitness and vitality have been stubborn themes, the political surrogacy of sport has come into stark relief.

In the overwhelmingly Black and gay WNBA, Clark has inadvertently become a champion to Maga Americans who fight against wokeness. At the all-inclusive Olympics, the champion gymnast Simone Biles prompted debates about work ethic and even the boxers Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting became global culture war fodder. In the ultra-conservative NFL, Aaron Rodgers gets a green light to air his conspiracy theories on Covid and 9/11. The days when Laura Ingraham or another conservative pundit might tell an outspoken athlete to “shut up and dribble” are gone. Now it’s more like shut up and juggle these convictions.

And it translates directly to the election stage. July’s Republican national convention, suspiciously light on lawmaker presenters, played out like a college pep rally. The UFC president, Dana White, gave Trump a football hero’s introduction. Hulk Hogan, like a matryoshka doll, tore off one jingoistic sleeveless tee to reveal a Maga sleeveless T-shirt. At the Democratic national convention, meanwhile, the vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz provided the ticket a considerable measure of jock insurance, a sociological term of art for the masculine bona fides (football, hunting, military service) that give Walz latitude to wear his heart on his sleeve without being seen as weak. And to make his own football metaphors. He likened Project 2025, the radical tome the Heritage Foundation has proffered for Trump’s re-election transition, to a playbook. “They spend a lot of time pretending they know nothing about this,” Walz said of the Trump campaign’s effort to distance their man from the plan. “But look, I coached high school football long enough to know, and trust me on this: when somebody takes the time to draw up a playbook, they’re going to use it.”

In both arenas, sports and political, the stakes are only getting higher.

From Muhammad Ali to the WNBA

According to a 2023 Washington Post/University of Maryland poll, Americans are split on whether professional athletes should use their platform to espouse their social and political views. This is as fans are especially attuned to the views expressed in America’s biggest sports leagues. The most outspoken male athletes tend to come from the NBA – an exceedingly progressive arena relative to football, baseball and Nascar.

Last month’s Democratic national convention tipped off with Golden State’s Steve Kerr, the dean of NBA coaches, taking the stage at the United Center and delivering a full-throated endorsement of the vice-president. “After the results are tallied, we can, in the words of the great Steph Curry, tell Donald Trump: ‘Night, night,’” joked Kerr, nodding at Curry’s flagrant victory pose. This was weeks after Curry himself offered his own public support of Harris when the vice-president visited with USA Basketball just before the Olympics. And when LeBron James takes a stand (“WE DEMAND CHANGE!” he tweeted after George Floyd), the NBA commissioner, Adam Silver, often backs him up.

Still, for all of the headway the NBA has made in foregrounding progressive political views and mobilizing voters, it lags well behind its sister league. The WNBA was not only first to embrace gay marriage and the social justice movement, but also led the campaign to replace the appointed Georgia lawmaker Kelly Loeffler, a team owner, with Raphael Warnock in the US Senate. Without WNBA players raising their voices in public and putting pressure on lawmakers and the Biden administrators, Brittney Griner arguably never would have made it home from Russian imprisonment. After the WNBA’s mid-summer break for the Olympics, multiple players returned to work wearing T-shirts endorsing Harris for president.

The current generation of athlete activists trace their roots to legendary rabble-rousers such as Muhammad Ali and Tommie Smith. Taking a stand wasn’t easy back then. “We had political overtones right over our heads,” says Smith, who mounted his historic Black power protest at the 1968 Olympics anyway. “The government and the Olympic Committee was laying threats on us. Fortune 500 companies were telling us we better not come home looking for no job. But I still had to go up to the podium and do what I did.”

The social media age has given athletes a proper platform and more latitude to speak out than ever before. But some, like Clark, are not yet comfortable weighing in on off-court matters; as far as the most recent public records can tell, she isn’t even registered to vote. Because of that passivity, the discourse – whether about the WNBA’s Black veterans playing Clark too tough (“This is a league that refuses to hold hostile players accountable,” grandstanded the Indiana congressman Jim Banks) or about Clark earning significantly less than male peers despite her ceiling-cracking endorsement portfolio (“Women are not paid their fair share,” the president tweeted) – happens totally outside of her.

Clark’s considered neutrality would not have seemed out of place 30 years ago, when athletes were more concerned with protecting their financial turf. But now players don’t hesitate to get into the politics game. Sometimes the effort is as small as Taylor Walls – the Tampa Bay Rays shortstop who is white – celebrating an extra-base hit by aping Trump’s defiant post-assassination stance to mixed live reviews (he’s since reframed it as a tribute to “strength”). Sometimes it’s as big as Raven Saunders – the mask-wearing American female shot putter who is Black, gay and uses they/them pronouns – shocking onlookers at the Tokyo Games with her X-gesture protest on the medal stand.

The gesture, they said, represented “the intersection of where all people who are oppressed meet”.

The NFL as the bastion of conservatism

Conservative groupthink is most apparent on the football field. That was never more apparent than when the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick challenged league orthodoxy with his racial equity-driven protests of the national anthem. More recently, as college athletes have started getting paid like pros, well-heeled administrators and coaches have lined up before Congress to admonish an economic system suddenly bent on compensating a largely Black labor force that has toiled for decades essentially for free.

America’s unbidden appetite for all things football is how Tommy Tuberville, a slick former college coach, winds up a US senator and makes his mark blocking 400 military promotions over objections to the Pentagon’s abortion policy. And football’s inextricable ties to evangelical Christianity are how a recent supreme court decision favored a Washington state public high school football coach who was fired for convening post-game prayer circles on the field. When cartoon campaign ads billing a helmeted Harris as the “official candidate of the Philadelphia Eagles” began springing up on bus shelters around town, the NFL’s toughest crowd was unsparing. (“Can we leave politics out of sport?” one complained, as the Eagles disavowed the ads and pledged to take them down.) The star quarterbacks Joe Burrow, Jared Goff and Daniel Jones were just as swift to correct the record after a series of viral social media posts had claimed they had joined a Harris fundraising call.

When it comes to political messaging, football sticks with the conservative approach – a winning gameplan to most of their fans.

But conservatives don’t mind veering away from the field when it comes to admonishing those who don’t support their causes. When the gender witch-hunt of Khelif, the Algerian boxing gold medalist, reached critical mass during the Paris Olympics, arch-conservatives moved on to interrogating the womanhood of the US swim great Katie Ledecky and rugby bronze medalist Ilona Maher, who hasn’t been shy about publicly supporting Kamala Harris or advocating for women’s reproductive rights.

In the past eight years the right has reduced Simone Biles, universally recognized as the greatest gymnast of all time, to a hackneyed racial stereotype – the Black layabout who complains instead of pulling herself up by her bootstraps.

Since she took a mental health break in the middle of the 2020 Tokyo Games, the North Carolina GOP gubernatorial challenger Mark Robinson hasn’t been able to let it go. “My generation is cut from a different cloth, that I don’t quit when the going gets tough,” he said in a speech to the Alexander county Republican party in 2021. “[But] I’m not like somebody out there flipping around on TV on some monkey bars out there trying to get a gold medal for myself. I’m doing this for a bigger cause.” Never mind that she returned to competition, medaled and was virtually unstoppable in Paris.

At this summer’s Paris Olympics, Biles’s silver-medal winning former teammate MyKayla Skinner reprised the Robinson line, saying that the USA Gymnastics current team – a multicultural and racially diverse gang that nicknamed themselves the Golden Girls – lacked work ethic. Biles, while nominally excluded from Skinner’s analysis, took umbrage all the same and got the last laugh with her teammates when they won the women’s team gold. Swamped with negative comments, Skinner beseeched her former teammate to condemn the cyberbullying. Essentially, Skinner retreated into her white privilege – going full Karen, in this case – in hopes of regaining ground in a culture war she restarted. Surprisingly, it has not worked.

All of this has transformed sports from a neutral platform for fun and games to a politically charged arena where major movers go to prove their strength. June’s presidential debate devolved into an argument over who’s longer off the tee – Trump or Biden, whose “Dark Brandon” epithet derives from the world of Nascar. At that moment, both men seemed to be borrowing from the playbook favored by Kim Jong-il, Vladimir Putin and other strongmen who embellish their sporting credentials to burnish their cult of personality.

At the Republican national convention, JD Vance, a proud Ohio State grad, joked about having to earn votes from Michigan – a college football rivalry born from a revolutionary war-era border dispute. In the vastness of Fiserv Forum, home of the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks, some in the crowd looked on while wearing cheeseheads – the official headdress of Green Bay Packers fans. “It felt like a pep rally because there was literally no conversation about policy,” says Carl Suddler, an Emory University professor who studies race, history and sports. “It was, ‘My team is better than theirs.’ And people eat that stuff up.” What’s more, it all fits with the party’s cynical gameplan to reach Black men, the biggest consumers of sports television.

The surprise substitution on the Democratic presidential ticket, from Biden to Harris, also has played out like the story of the quarterback on the hot seat forced off the job amid a grinding media drumbeat – down to NBA scoop merchant Shams Charania beating his rivals to the breaking news. When introducing her vice-presidential pick, Tim Walz, Harris made a point of referring to him as “Coach Walz”; at the Democratic national convention, his sports honorific was much preferred over his elected title: governor of Minnesota.

Even those on the sidelines play a part. Before his presidential candidacy tanked in the GOP primaries, Vivek Ramaswamy waxed nostalgic about his charmed experience as a former ballboy and sometime hitting partner for Andre Agassi – the American tennis royal who has repeatedly turned down invitations from both sides of the aisle to run for Congress in his native Nevada. “His sage advice: the longest distance between two points is that between your mind & your heart,” Ramaswamy wrote in a post. “Bend the former to meet the latter.” Rich talk coming from a guy who boosts the great replacement theory and claims the January 6 riot was an inside job.

Politicians weren’t always so shameless about forcing sports ties. Richard Nixon’s obsession with the Washington Redskins was considered as deviant as his habit of taping all his conversations, while Gerald Ford, a two-way football star at Michigan, never got due respect for being the finest athlete to occupy the Oval Office. It’s only since Barack Obama proclaimed himself the “hooper in chief” that politicians have made leading with fandom their go-to play.

Now both the American projections on its athletes and politicians’ obsession with having their own athletic credentials are as intertwined as a ballpark funnel cake – larded, saccharine and loaded with empty calories. The paradigm has even reached the point where athletes are taking the heat for this sports bait-and-switch instead of the partisan activists who are really dialing up these plays. Asked about her unwitting role in this tense political game, Clark seemed exasperated, telling reporters: “It’s not something I can control.”