AAmong the strangest developments of 2026 has been the apparent connection between the Winter Olympics and the US’s illegal and unprovoked war on Iran. High-speed camera drones were the highlight of TV coverage of the recent Milano Cortina Games, bringing viewers up close and personal as Olympic athletes glided down the slopes and around the tracks in the figure skating and figure skating events. The constant buzzing of drones aside, the introduction of quadcopter-powered cameras was felt to be a real step to offer winter sports, bringing a new perspective (real) to events that had become, in recent decades, stable as a viewing experience.
As soon as the Olympics ended, the video of the flight appeared on our screens again – only the images, in this case, were of the very dark variety. Instead of the amazing hip swings of skiers and the high speed of monobobbers, for the past month our feed has been filled with satellite and drone images of the US military striking Iranian planes, ships, vehicles, military facilities and civilians. The aerial spectacle that brought the power and speed and thrill and excitement of Olympic competition to our screens now transmits the daily agony of battle in light two-minute clips to our phones. In the age of the duck milkshake, it’s almost expected that anything good in our culture will eventually turn sour – and technology, of course, is agnostic, a tool that can be used for both good and evil. But even in a culture as loose and hypocritical as ours, the seamless transition from a drone-delivered spectacle of Olympic glory to footage rendered of war crimes felt strange.
There has been a lot of discussion in recent weeks about the “memeification” of the war, which is clearly defined in terms of the distribution of the Trump administration’s Hollywood and sports images in its videos about the activities of the US military in Iran. What is not mentioned much is the degree to which war, in the United States, at least, is being communicated to the public and – most disturbingly – is being conducted through the vision and behavior of sports games.
The status of the drone as the hinge technology that connects sports and war should not, perhaps, be too surprising. Professional drone racing emerged at the beginning of the boom in niche sports a decade ago. The Drone Racing League, the largest and most popular competition in this loud and fast game, features goggles-wearing pilots guiding light, first-person drones at speeds of up to 90mph around neon-lit makeshift courses built in the stadiums of existing sports franchises. Many courses of drone racing extended to the stadiums themselves, which means that the presence of live spectators was always a game: this was a game designed to be consumed above all on the screen, with reels set to tempo electronic beats. The military has played a role in drone racing almost since the league’s inception in 2015. The US Air Force has been a long-time sponsor of the Drone Racing League, using the competition as a recruiting ground for new pilots, while the league has spawned advanced companies such as Performance Drone Works, which is now one of the leading systems of the United States military.
The League continued for a few years after PDW’s split with a separate military contract, before finding its way back in 2024 by launching into the Infinite Reality metaverse. Since then, the Drone Racing League, like Infinite Reality itself, seems dark; The league hasn’t held events or posted online for nearly a year, and its website is down. Maybe it’s by design: the drone has outgrown its origins as a competitive sports car and is now a pure weapon of war. (Although they are larger than the first-person view drones used to run, monitor and capture images, the Iranian Shahed drones and the copycat American Lucas drones are the defining weapons of the current war.) But the marriage of the military and sports spirit that created the drone race lives on in some parts of this war.
In a sports culture that wants to eliminate live spectators (or at least make attendance at the games so expensive that it would be the privilege of a few rich people) and interact with all the consumption of sports through a screen, there is a terrible idea to replace the drone races and lower the gate to the Olympic athletes in the US skiers in the Middle East. These episodes clean up the conflict, emptying it of its real and human costs: all the horror and destruction of war as seen by those on the scene of the attack is removed from a series of deadly gunshots. This is war as sport: action without living witnesses, suspense or consequences, pure kinesis unfettered by the messy business of circumstance.
The Trump administration made no substantive effort to justify the war to the American people or to seek congressional authorization to attack Iran. Instead the goal seems to be to legitimize war as entertainment. The White House wants the nation to “stop” this war the same way it might have March Madness or Major League Baseball: randomly, like a series of short interruptions to read on our phones. Of course, this is close to how the president himself absorbs information about the conflict. According to a recent report, Donald Trump’s daily briefings on the progress of the war from military officials usually take the form of a two-minute video of “explosives”. Every day, a group of social media managers are scrolling through the green drone and arrow images to “sniff” the conflict with one eye for excitement that the NBA can use to collect a package of Wemby dunks. War ads are as unsympathetic as war itself. If drone races have helped the US military government to think about the future of war, the Iran war helps us to think about the future of sports – as a wasted, fun entertainment that can be consumed anywhere, on any device, where the fate of those on the ground is linked to the interests of those in power.
Not only does this fight show the extent of the culture of sports taken from sports, it also shows the extent to which Trumpian trash talk has undermined the language of global discourse. As thousands die in Iran, Lebanon, the Gulf and beyond, the commander-in-chief’s tweets about the war have been even more reckless than usual: “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy criminals,” Trump tweeted on Sunday. US foreign policy is now being run by the most annoying member of your sports club. As the world teeters on the brink of a military and economic crisis, the president is glued to his phone, letting fly all of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s awards for Along Came Polly. Even Trump’s unscheduled visits to Iran’s leadership have been staged like major sporting events, coinciding with prime time on America’s east coast.
Being forced to see everything in this war with a game plan is not limited to the president. Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, recently said that the US could see “the last thread” in Iran. The tyranny and brutality of the sports joke underlie every boastful statement from defense secretary Pete Hegseth about the US military’s “supremacy”, “lethal” and “unbreakable resolve”. Unconcerned by mental anguish, the political class is left free to see the war as a game, shouting “more bombs” that will send Iran “back to the stone age” in one voice and with the same ethnic and harmless energy with which they cheer on their college football team. In a way, the continuous trumpet system of American progress and victory in the face of Iranian opposition that is stronger and more knowledgeable than expected, also represents a strong borrowing from the language of modern sports, with their hypocritical teaching and insistence on ignoring the obstacles of the competition to “trust the process”. Even those outside the Standard Zone are trying to deepen the relationship between sports and the Trumpian state. Kash Patel, a man whose experience in political office is so indistinguishable from that of an aspiring businessman that he once designed his own FBI-style Nikes, held an event last month asking UFC fighters to help train FBI agents. (Patel, readers may recall, has a history of appearing for political functions in a Liverpool tie.) Then there is all the questionable activity throughout the war on investment and prediction markets: the disease of betting on sports has so thoroughly infected the Magaverse that it is not difficult to imagine that the behavior of this war is timed to increase the chances of thinking within Trump’s members.
Are war and sports still indistinguishable? Perhaps it’s an oversight, but it seems increasingly clear that sports culture is at the center of the ongoing turmoil across the Middle East. The Spanish writer José Ortega y Gasset once argued that the modern state was born from sports – that the desire of young athletes to go out into the world to hunt, fight and celebrate forces the first social organization to become a political structure with stable customs, laws and institutions. Finally, in Ortega y Gasset’s idiosyncratic history of civilization, mature men came to dominate public affairs and the energy of youth and sport was replaced by the equality of the middle-aged and rational.
To the history of modern America is adding an unsettling coda: under the leadership of the self-styled men who rule it, the US today is returning to the old state of sportsmanship. The difference, in fact, is that the rulers of this restored country do not show the strength or courage that comes from actual participation in athletic competition. America’s leaders behave not as actors on the stage but as spectators: they eat the war like followers, comment on it like followers, conduct it like followers, and their desire to rise shows all the irresponsibility of the worst kind of partisan attraction. The end of the state of sports is not to get degrees outside the game but to return to the game, not maturity, wisdom, patience, or grace, but the destruction of managers will become fanaticism and shameless.
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