I can sort of understand why this is happening.   Everybody hates the U.S. right now, and I don't blame them.  Considering what our government has done to Afghanistan and Iraq, and the fact that the American people overwhelmingly either support or vote for Bush or sit idly by and allow it to happen, means that Americans are expected to hang their heads and be low key when out and about in other countries.   Can you imagine if the American team had sauntered out there, waving the flag, grinning and putting on a display?  Yikes.  The understanding would be that to flaunt American national pride is to somehow also say that the team also supports everything that the American government does.

But at the same time I can see how this is all crazy manipulation.   

You mentioned the analogy of the US being the outsider child that nobody wants to play with - that's a good analogy.  In the everyday world, if somebody does something that others seriously don't like and don't agree with, that person gets ostracized, and the rest of the group they associate with gets the cold shoulder as well.  The same applies on the bigger scale when an American team goes overseas to represent their county whom everybody else in the world hates and disagrees with.   The team gets the cold shoulder because they are an extension, a representative of that government. 

On a sidenote, there's apparantly still predjudice with some people in America regarding Russians.   So engrained is it in the American collective psyche that Russians are evil Red Communists that even in a post-Cold War 2005 it lingers.  I found this out back when I worked at the hotel earlier this year.  There were quite a few Russian girls working there, and it came up in conversation how they've been treated by quite a few Americans since getting here last year, both at the hotel and in their personal lives.  I had no idea this problem existed until hearing about it from them.   When I asked one of them "Seriously??" a bit disbelievingly,  she nodded and bugged her eyes at me to indicate "Are you kidding???  OH yeah....TOTAL predjudice."   Of course any intelligent person would realize that the Russian people had nothing to do with what their idiotic government was doing.   To think that the average Russian person on the streets of Moscow wanted their government to launch all their missiles and start WWIII is insane.  But don't explain that to some Americans who want to act all hostile and rude to a couple of innocent Russian girls who had nothing to do with anything.   In their small little minds, the Russian people are evil and all of them were rooting for the Kremlin to nuke the U.S. and if they could have pushed the button themselves they would have.     I know that many Japanese and Vietnamese people in America have also experienced the hold over grudges too.   So just like the rest of the world wants to ostracize the American teammates for what their government does, so some Americans also in turn blame innocent people for what their governemnts do.

It's a stupid world we live in.

Well, everybody had fun, but.... there was one but. Now, I'm not Anti-American, nor anybody in the stadium, but when American team came there was a cold moment. The team were colourless, no flags (every team had their flags and some teams also had Turkish flags in their hands, typical olympic procession), nearly no waving, no cheers from the players. One of big newspapers wrote the next day "we were hearing that the players of US teams in international sport events are told 'don't look around too much, don't cheer up, don't carry American flag after winning any competition' etc. and unfortunately it seems it's true. we wonder how long will this go on, the exclusive 'us and them' mentality. The US team were just like a outsider child that nobody wants to play with, in a stadium full of 60.000 people having fun".

I absolutely did not like this. It's obvious that darkside is playing on US - as it's the babylon of our century/our civilisation. It's one thing to read/hear about this, it's bitter another thing to experience this. 

FeritCiva, NR's sports journalist

PS: The opening seremony was full of symbols, as I expected. Goro Adachi had to see this