Fox News exec says US Olympic team is too gay to win medals

Fox News executive editor John Moody has a lot to say about Team USA athletes — but none of it is about their athletic accomplishments.

In an editorial published just ahead of Friday’s opening ceremony, Moody expressed his concern that the “darker, gayer” athletes representing the United States at the 2018 Olympic Games would cost the team medals, and asserted — without any evidence — that some athletes may have been given a spot on Team USA because of their skin color or sexual orientation, rather than their performance.

“Unless it’s changed overnight, the motto of the Olympics, since 1894, has been ‘Faster, Higher, Stronger,'” Moody wrote on FoxNews.com. “It appears the U.S. Olympic Committee would like to change that to ‘Darker, Gayer, Different.’ If your goal is to win medals, that won’t work.”

Moody went on to complain about a recent Washington Post article in which a USOC official expressed pride in the diversity of the 2018 U.S. Olympic delegation, bemoaning what he called an “embarrassing laundry list of how many African-Americans, Asians and openly gay athletes are on this year’s U.S. team.”

“No sport that we are aware of awards points — or medals — for skin color or sexual orientation,” Moody wrote, asking if this year’s athletes were “selected because they’re the best at what they do, or because they’re the best publicity for our current obsession with having one each from Column A, B and C?”

From there, Moody’s editorial devolved into a hyperbolic rant about — what else — political correctness, which the Fox News executive cited as the reason for Team USA’s diverse membership.

“Insisting that sports bow to political correctness by assigning teams quotas for race, religion or sexuality is like saying that professional basketball goals will be worth four points if achieved by a minority in that sport – white guys, for instance –  instead of the two or three points awarded to black players, who make up 81 percent of the NBA. Any plans to fix that disparity? Didn’t think so,” Moody huffed.

No one is insisting that, though. There are no “quotas” or selection criteria based on race, religion, or sexual orientation used in the determination of who is qualified for membership on any of the U.S. Olympic teams. The closest thing to a “quota” in Olympic team membership is Principle 6 — the Olympic Charter’s nondiscrimination clause.

But Moody was more interested in stoking the flames of the right-wing outrage machine than acknowledging those pesky facts. Continuing his tirade, Moody went on to blame non-existent complaints about political correctness for ruining the competitive nature of sports. 

“Complaining that every team isn’t a rainbow of political correctness defeats the purpose of sports, which is competition,” he wrote. “At the Olympic level, not everyone is a winner. Not everyone gets a little plastic trophy to take home.”

This year’s winter team includes more African-American and Asian-American athletes than any previous U.S. winter team, as well as the first two openly gay male athletes to represent the U.S. in the winter games. While the team is the most diverse ever, the composition of the team is still overwhelmingly white and heterosexual. Out of 243 athletes, 10 are black, 10 are Asian, and the rest are “predominantly white,” according to the Washington Post.

And despite what Moody alleges, there is no reason to suggest that the increased diversity of the 2018 team comes at the expense of competitiveness.

But Moody — who was reportedly handpicked by former Fox News chief Roger Ailes — knows what sells. For the Fox News crowd, outrage is money in the bank — and Moody has shown his willingness to chase that paycheck wherever it takes him, even if it means taking jabs at American athletes on the eve of the Olympic Games.