Andrew Milligan/PA Pictures through Getty Pictures
After President Trump snubbed the U.S. ladies’s Olympic hockey workforce, a few of its followers have been fast to reply. Amongst them, Taste Flav, the erstwhile member of the pioneering rap group Public Enemy and tv character recognized for the bejeweled clocks he wears as signature necklaces.
In a locker room name over the weekend, Trump invited the U.S. males’s hockey workforce to the White Home to have a good time their gold medal victory over Canada, and provided to move them there on a navy airplane.
“I need to let you know, we’ll must carry the ladies’s workforce. You do know that,” he added, to laughter from the male athletes. To underscore his obvious disdain for the ladies’s workforce, Trump joked that he would seemingly be impeached if he did not.
The U.S. ladies’s hockey workforce gained a gold medal of their very own on the Olympics, additionally trouncing Canada. Gamers declined the president’s invitation to the State of the Union handle, which got here within the wake of his telephone name to the boys’s workforce.
Taste Flav was fast to supply another. “If the USA Ladies’s Hockey Crew desires an actual celebration and invite… I am going to host them in Las Vegas,” the rapper wrote on his official Instagram channel. “Do some good dinners and exhibits and good instances. I am certain I can get a lodge and airline to assist me out right here and have a good time these ladies for actual for actual.”
In recent times, Flav has usual himself as an enthusiastic proponent of the Olympics, appearing as an official “hype man” for this yr’s bobsled and skeleton groups. He additionally sponsored the U.S. water polo groups on the Paris Olympics in 2024, partly after studying how little ladies athletes earn.
“I truly love this for Taste Flav,” says Frankie de la Cretaz, an impartial journalist who writes the queer-oriented Out of Your League publication. “For him, this actually began when he obtained behind the ladies’s water polo workforce in the course of the Summer season Olympics. And to be clear, the U.S. is without doubt one of the solely nations that doesn’t federally fund their elite Olympic and nationwide workforce athletes. Lots of them are funding themselves by way of sponsorships.
Flav’s public stand in assist of the feminine hockey gamers is sort of a flip, De la Cretaz added, for a celeb who as soon as referred to twin feminine contestants on his VHS actuality present Taste of Love as “Factor One” and “Factor Two.” Over the previous few years, Flav has supported feminine athletes constantly, they mentioned, and never simply in the course of the high-wattage occasions of the Olympics. “He by no means does it in a approach that feels demeaning or performative. And I’ve nothing however respect, truly, for the best way he is proven up for girls athletes.”
De la Cretaz mentioned they noticed extra hypocrisy coming from a president who has labored to ban transgender athletes. “A lot of the anti-trans sports activities push has been about quote unquote, defending ladies’s sports activities. And if you wish to ‘shield ladies’s sports activities,’ it truly could be about investing and giving them the equal alternative that males have and respecting them as athletes.”
