Hockey controversial

Winning two consecutive ice hockey world championships after a decade and a half of outright decline has generated unjustified euphoria in Russia about the beginning of a new era of revival in this sport. The 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, during which the Russian team, which was absolutely the strongest in terms of composition since the collapse of the USSR, played frankly poorly in the preliminary stage and was brutally beaten by the Canadians in the first elimination match, caused a wave of indignation among the fans. But if you look at the totality of the problems of Russian hockey, you have to admit that the failure in Vancouver is certainly no less natural than two triumphs at the world championships.

Of course, the creation of the Continental Hockey League along the lines of the NHL with full-fledged farm clubs should ideally raise the level of Russian club teams. But for now, the Russian league (despite the international status of the KHL, it is still perceived as something like the Russian Open Championship) was second in the world after the NHL, and remains so. At the same time, the gap between our teams and NHL clubs in the organization of hockey operations and the level of play is hardly narrowing.

The level of youth, juvenile and junior hockey is even more indicative: here Russia is burning smokelessly at all world championships in competition with overseas teams. In addition, as the World Junior Championship (players under 18 years old) that just ended in Belarus showed, ours are significantly weaker not only than the US team, but also the Swedes and Finns.

When the Russian national team competed at the Games in Vancouver, its players said that the team trained at a regular school skating rink. Moreover, they did not talk about this as discrimination: the quality of the school skating rink allowed world-famous stars to train on it. How many high-quality school skating rinks do you know in Russia? And there isn’t exactly an abundance of any hockey rinks in our northern country. Such a developed ice infrastructure is by no means unique to Canada with its national cult of hockey. I saw with my own eyes hockey rinks and palaces in small Finnish towns: it is unlikely that facilities of such quantity and quality can be found even in the leading hockey centers of Russia.

Without infrastructure, without quality children's coaches, without strong junior hockey, declaring the beginning of some new victorious era is, to say the least, controversial. Russia undoubtedly remains one of the leading hockey powers, but by no objective measure is it any stronger than Canada, the USA, Sweden or Finland. By the way, in the early 2000s it seemed that the era of the Czech national team was dawning, but now this great hockey power has clearly sagged: by the way, Czech youth teams also perform very mediocrely at all world championships. But the Swiss are clearly joining the “big six” and have begun to develop hockey better. Slovakia is also making progress.

Against this background, we can rather talk about the emergence of prerequisites for the revival of the victorious traditions of our hockey than about the revival itself. Of course, the organization of business in the Continental Hockey League is a step forward compared to the era of regular Russian championships. But even in the still very short era of the KHL, we risk losing powerful hockey brands: Tolyatti Lada and Moscow Dynamo. Big business still hasn't come to Russian hockey. Our richest entrepreneurs prefer to buy foreign football or basketball clubs. And state-owned companies either cannot cope with the “sports load” imposed from above, or they do not do it in the best way. By the way, even for Gazprom, the company that is actually the financial backbone of the KHL, St. Petersburg SKA is a much less significant political sports asset (in business terms it would be more correct to call it a “liability”) than the same football “Zenith”.

Several Russian clubs are already able to buy foreign legionnaires of a respectable level, but the best young Russian hockey players for the most part strive to get into the NHL, realizing that this is the best league in the world with potentially the best and, most importantly, reliable salaries. Whereas in Russia today, a club rich at the behest of political patrons could easily find itself with a dwarf budget tomorrow when such patronage disappears.

So even the third consecutive victory of the Russian national team at the World Championship (the composition of all teams there will be significantly weaker than at the Olympics) will not yet give reason to trumpet a sharp rise in our hockey. 25-30 years ago, any defeat of the USSR national team at the World Championships or Olympics was perceived as a sensation. Now winning the World Cup still looks more like a miracle than a pattern.

Semyon Novoprudsky