Last spring, my young daughter and I went to the opening day of Little League season in our small town of White Salmon, Wash. As always, it was a day for classic Americana: The Boy Scouts raised the Stars and Stripes over the ballfield, we sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” and a local celebrity threw the first pitch.
This year, the ceremonial pitcher was Vic Wild, a White Salmon native who won two gold medals in snowboarding at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. When the announcer called his name, Wild, wearing dark sunglasses and a flannel shirt, jogged to the pitcher’s mound. He grinned and shrugged at the audience, then wound up and let loose a pretty good pitch. The crowd went crazy.
What nobody mentioned — not the announcer, not the players, not the smiling parents — was that Wild, who graduated from the local high school and trained on nearby Mount Hood, didn’t win his double gold for Team USA. He won it for Russia, and photos of him with Vladimir Putin prove it.
