The morning after the Seahawks became Super Bowl champions, people spent Monday trying to figure out who had won the other widely talked about competition of the night: Dueling halftime performances between Bad Bunny and conservative darling Kid Rock. Nielsen figures won’t be released until Tuesday on how many people tuned in to watch Bad Bunny, a U.S. citizen born in the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico and the NFL’s superstar performer. Most years the show attracts more than 100 million viewers. The conservative organization Turning Point USA arranged the competing performance, and spokesperson Andrew Kolvet told Fox News host Brian Kilmeade on Sunday evening that “at one point” roughly 10 million people were watching the Kid Rock show live across all social media platforms. The organization didn't release exact figures when asked on Monday morning, though at one point roughly 5 million people were watching the show live on YouTube.
The race to capture national attention during the most widely watched event in the U.S. has been cast as a competition to define the country given that Turning Point organized its performance with President Donald Trump’s blessing to protest the NFL picking the star from Puerto Rico as its headliner.
The performances come at a polarizing time in the U.S., with stark lines drawn between proponents of Trump’s immigration policies and the people opposing large-scale immigration crack downs in American cities. Within weeks of the Super Bowl, two white Americans citizens were killed by federal agents in Minneapolis, a city that was last in the global spotlight during protests over the murder of George Floyd.
Bad Bunny has been a vocal and outspoken opponent of ICE, although he made no mention of the agency during his performance. Kid Rock is one of the president’s highest profile celebrity allies.
The “All American Halftime Show” headlined by Kid Rock, included a video and photo tribute to the late conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who was fatally shot last year on a Utah college campus.
The program lasted roughly 30 minutes and also featured country musicians Brantley Gilbert, Gabby Barrett and Lee Brice. Several performers declared that the alternative show represented “the real America,” while Kolvet told Fox News that the viewership amounted to a “massive” success.
“People are paying attention,” he said.
The TPUSA show also aired on numerous right-leaning broadcast networks, including OAN News and Trinity Broadcasting Network. The 10 million viewers Kolvet estimated tuned in would be dwarfed by previous Super Bowl viewership.
Kendrick Lamar set the record with 133.5 million viewers of his 2025 halftime show, topping Usher’s 2024 performance that drew 123.4 million.
Bad Bunny, born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio and who became the most streamed artist of 2025, brought unabashedly Puerto Rican culture to Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California.
His theme was unity and he danced and sang across the field under a screen reading “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.” Many songs he performed showcased his 2025 album “Debí Tirar Más Fotos,” the first all-Spanish album to win a Grammy for album of the year.
The show didn't shy away from Puerto Rico's most pressing political inequalities, and included direct references to the island's chronic power outages and the fight for sovereignty from the United States.
Trump, who skipped the Super Bowl and said he wouldn't watch Bad Bunny's performance, called Sunday's halftime show “one of the worst, EVER” in a post on Truth Social.
“It makes no sense, is an affront to the Greatness of America, and doesn’t represent our standards of Success, Creativity, or Excellence,” Trump wrote. “This ‘Show’ is just a ‘slap in the face’ to our Country, which is setting new standards and records every single day.”
Bad Bunny performs during halftime of the NFL Super Bowl 60 football game between the New England Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks, Sunday, Feb. 8, 2026, in Santa Clara, Calif. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)
CORTINA D'AMPEZZO, Italy (AP) — Lindsey Vonn sustained a "complex tibia fracture that is currently stable but will require multiple surgeries to fix properly” after her devastating crash in the Olympic downhill, the skier said in a social media post late Monday.
Vonn posted on Instagram about her left leg injuries following her fall in Sunday's race.
“While yesterday did not end the way I had hoped, and despite the intense physical pain it caused, I have no regrets,” Vonn said.
Nine days before Sunday's crash, the 41-year-old Vonn ruptured the ACL in her left knee. It is an injury that sidelines pro athletes for months, but ski racers have on occasion competed that way. She appeared stable in two downhill training runs at the Milan Cortina Games.
Onlookers on social media wondered if Vonn’s ruptured ACL could have played a factor in her crash near the top of the Olympia delle Tofana course, where she has a World Cup record 12 wins. That maybe, on a healthy left knee, she would not have clipped a gate and been able to stave off a crash.
“Yesterday my Olympic dream did not finish the way I dreamt it would,” Vonn said. “It wasn’t a story book ending or a fairy tail, it was just life. I dared to dream and had worked so hard to achieve it. Because in Downhill ski racing the difference between a strategic line and a catastrophic injury can be as small as 5 inches.
“I was simply 5 inches too tight on my line when my right arm hooked inside of the gate, twisting me and resulted in my crash. My ACL and past injuries had nothing to do with my crash whatsoever.”
Vonn’s father said Monday that the American superstar will no longer race if he has any influence over her decision.
“She’s 41 years old and this is the end of her career,” Alan Kildow said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. “There will be no more ski races for Lindsey Vonn, as long as I have anything to say about it.”
When she arrived in Cortina last week, Vonn said she had consulted with her team of physicians and trainers before deciding to move ahead with racing. The International Ski and Snowboard Federation does not check on the injury statuses of athletes.
“I firmly believe that this has to be decided by the individual athlete,” FIS president Johan Eliasch said Monday in Bormio. “And in her case, she certainly knows her injuries on her body better than anybody else. And if you look around here today with all the athletes, the athletes yesterday, every single athlete has a small injury of some kind.
“What is also important for people to understand, that the accident that she had yesterday, she was incredibly unlucky. It was a one in a 1,000,” Eliasch added. “She got too close to the gate, and she got stuck when she was in the air in the gate and started rotating. No one can recover from that, unless you do a 360. … This is something which is part of ski racing. It’s a dangerous sport.”
The Italian hospital in Treviso where Vonn was being treated said late Sunday she had undergone surgery to repair a broken left leg. The U.S. Ski Team has said only that Vonn “sustained an injury, but is in stable condition and in good hands with a team of American and Italian physicians.”
Pierre Ducrey, the sports director for the International Olympic Committee, noted Vonn was able to train and had experts counseling her decision.
“So from that point of view, I don’t think we can say that she should or shouldn’t have participated. This decision was really hers and her team to take,” he said. “She made the decision and unfortunately it led to the injury, but I think it’s really the way that the decision gets made for every athlete that participates to the downhill.”
Teammate Keely Cashman also said Vonn's ACL had nothing to do with her crash.
“Totally incorrect,” said Cashman — who was knocked unconscious in a serious crash five years ago. “People that don’t know ski racing don’t really understand what happened yesterday. She hooked her arm on the gate, which twisted her around. She was going probably 70 miles an hour, and so that twists your body around. That has nothing to do with her ACL, nothing to with her knee. I think a lot of people are ridiculing that, and a lot people don’t (know) what’s going on.”
The hours after her crash was filled with opinions, mostly of the second-guessing nature. Like, should someone have intervened?
“It’s her choice,” veteran skier Federica Brignone of Italy said. “If it’s your body, then you decide what to do, whether to race or not. It’s not up to others. Only you.”
Brignone suffered multiple fractures in her tibial plateau and fibula bone in her left leg during a crash in April and made it back to compete in the Olympic downhill — finishing 10th.
American downhiller Kyle Negomir echoed that thought.
“Lindsey’s a grown woman, and the best speed skier to ever do this sport. If she made her decision, I think she should absolutely be allowed to take that risk,” Negomir said. “She’s obviously good enough that she’s capable of pulling it off. Just because it happened to not pan out yesterday doesn’t mean that it definitely wasn’t a possibility that she could just crush it and have a perfect run.”
Graham reported from Bormio. AP Sports Writer Will Graves in Treviso and Daniella Matar in Milan contributed to this report.
AP Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/milan-cortina-2026-winter-olympics
United States' Lindsey Vonn concentrates ahead of an alpine ski, women's downhill official training, at the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy, Friday, Feb. 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Marco Trovati)
General view of Ca' Foncello Hospital in Treviso, Italy, Sunday, Feb. 8, 2026, where U.S. skier Lindsey Vonn is hospitalized with a broken leg after crashing during the women's downhill competition at the Milan-Cortina Olympics. (Paola Garbuio/LaPresse via AP)
United States' Lindsey Vonn crashes into a gate during an alpine ski women's downhill race, at the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy, Sunday, Feb. 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
