Team USA star proud to represent Minnesotans 'standing up'

MILAN — Every two years, those tasked with selling, growing and protecting the Olympic Games, from International Olympic Committee members to local politicians and organizers, preach about the unifying power of the Games with evangelical zeal and conviction.

Kelly Pannek, the pride of Plymouth, Minn., and a proud former University of Minnesota Golden Gopher, hopes the United States women’s hockey team’s performance in the Milano Cortina Olympic Games will lift the spirits of the residents of Minneapolis. Or maybe Team USA can at least distract them from a series of tragedies that have rocked the community and placed it at the center of a global spotlight and a national debate over free speech and the Trump administration’s deployment of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers to American cities.

So when the U.S. took the ice for its Olympic Games opener against Czechia on Thursday afternoon, Pannek’s head was in the game, but her heart was definitely also back home in Minnesota.

“So I’m really proud to represent our country,” Pannek said after Team USA’s 5-1 victory at the Milano Rho Ice Hockey Arena.

“I know I speak for our teammates, all my teammates, in that regard as well, especially, just proud to represent, again, the people that are exercising their rights and their freedoms and standing up for what has made our country, you know, special, and what has set us apart from, you know, others, maybe, is that ability to protest things you believe in, and to, you know, let your voice be heard and to support the people that maybe don’t have as big of a voice, right?” said Pannek, who now stars for the the PWHL’s Minnesota Frost and is one of five native Minnesotans on the U.S Olympic roster.

Six Team USA members play for the Frost while forward Abbey Murphy plays for the University of Minnesota.

“So I think it’s we have a special platform here as Olympians,” Pannek, a member of the 2018 Olympic champion and 2022 silver-medal teams, continued. “But I also think the Olympics is the time to bring people together and give them a spot to, you know, celebrate things and sportsmanship and competitiveness and that spirit. And I mean, the Olympics are really special. I think everyone gets a chance to participate. You feel it, but everyone has their memories watching it as well.”

Pannek took advantage of that chance Thursday, playing a leading role in a game that was even more lopsided than the final score suggests, setting up the second of two Hayley Scamurra goals and building on the form she displayed in the recent Rivalry Series and in helping the U.S. win the gold medal at last year’s World Championships, where she had four goals and four assists in seven games.

She said she was unaware that Vice President J.D. Vance was at the game, sitting four rows from the ice, behind Secretary of State Marco Rubio, surrounded by at least 20 Secret Service officers and security personnel. .

Vance, in an interview with the Daily Mail published this week, refused to apologize for reposting a social media post by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller shortly after Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse, was killed after being shot by masked federal agents. Immediately after Pretti’s death, administration and federal officials accused Pretti of trying assassinate federal agents. Video evidence, however, shows that Pretti, who had a permit to carry a firearm, had been unarmed by an agent before two agents shot him 10 times in the back as he was face down on the ground, after being pepper-sprayed and while being restrained by multiple agents.

“An assassin tried to murder federal agents and this is your response,” Miller wrote in the post that Vance reposted.

When asked by the Daily Mail if he would apologize for the repost in the wake of a ruling by Hennepin County medical examiner that Pretti’s death was a homicide, Vance responded: “For what?”

Moments before his death, Pretti was trying to aid a woman at a protest in response to another Minneapolis resident, Renee Nicole Good, also being shot to death by a federal agent earlier in the month.

Vance, speaking from the podium at the White House, described Good’s death as a “tragedy of her own making” and said she was part of a “lunatic fringe.” Vance also called Good a “deranged leftist” and said the ICE officer who shot her has “absolute immunity.”

Pannek was asked after the game what she thought of Vance and Rubio’s presence.

“I actually didn’t know they were here, so I don’t really have thoughts,” she said. “I think again, people are entitled to what they believe in, what they support.

“And I think it’s something that you have to respect of being an American, you know? We fought for that right to have your voice and to let be heard, but we’ve also, I think, again, you see, you know, I see a lot of people that are fighting for what they believe is right, and I think that’s, again, the hope and strength that, you know, we’ve seen back home in Minnesota. Especially, I think it embodies that American spirit of outside people are gonna have opinions on what they think they’re seeing, but we know what’s true in our communities and the people that are, you know, showing what their voices can do and make a difference that way.”