Miracle (Garretson)

The context surrounding the game made it much more significant than just a sporting event. Both the US and the USSR were right in the middle of the cold war, and the Soviets had recently invaded Afghanistan. Sports-wise, the Soviets had been dominating international play, and entered the games having won every gold medal since the 1960 games.
The article presents a sort of an idea about both teams paralleling their nation's ideals, like when with the following:
Therefore the Soviet squad was often referenced as the veteran team "drawn chiefly from officer-players of the Central Army Sports Club in MOSCllW" (Klose, 1980, p. F4). The US players "play like hell."
Coach Brooks kind of attested to this feeling with what he said in his phone conversation with President Carter, saying that the team's victory showed thatt he American way of life was the proper way to continue, as if the win verified that.
You could see these sort of cultral differences addressed in the movie, for instnace, when the US players are watching film on the Soviet team. One makes a comment about the Russians never smiling, and another replies by saying "They're Russians, they get shot if they smile."
There are many instancesi n the movie where I felt a sense of American pride. Obviously, when the American team defeats the Russian team, that's probably the biggest moment. Otherwise, I would have to agree with Nik on Eurizone saying where he is from when the team is skating lines. Brooks halts the conditioning/punishment as soon as Eurizone says he plays for the United States of America - it's as if thats all he needed to say, and that made me feel a great deal of pride as an American.
I think you could draw comparisons to the Palestinian nationalistic feelings from the Munich games. In both cases, people felt an tremendous deal of pride for their countries. The Palestinians used violence as their vehicle to achieve this pride and gain notoriety, while the Americans achieved this recognition and experienced this swelling of pride because of athletic accomplishment.