Steve Gann
Sandra 12010 Winter Olympics Guide: Ice Hockey
February 12th 2010 04:02
:
2010 Winter Olympics Guide: Ice Hockey
This is the 8th in a 15 part series on the sports of the winter games.
Ice Hockey is one of the few Olympic sports that allows professional athletes to compete. This year twelve teams divided into three groups will make up the men's field and eight teams divided into two groups will make up the women's field. This will be the first time since NHL players were allowed to compete that the Olympics will be held in a NHL city. For that reason hockey tickets will be one of the toughest to get during the two week events. Games will be played all through the two weeks starting on the 13th and ending on the 28th.
Men's Groups:
Group A
Canada
United States
Switzerland
Norway
Group B
Russia
Czech Republic
Slovakia
Latvia
Group C
Sweden
Finland
Belarus
Germany
Women's Groups:
Group A
Canada
Sweden
Switzerland
Slovakia
Group B
United States
Finland
Russia
China
History:
From oral histories, there is evidence of a tradition of an ancient hockey-like game played among the Mi'kmaq First Nation in Eastern Canada. In Legends of the Micmacs (1894), Silas T. Rand describes a Mi'kmaq ball game which the people called tooadijik. Rand also describes a game that was played (likely after European contact) with hurleys, called wolchamaadijik. European immigrants brought various versions of hockey-like games to Canada, such as the Irish sport of hurling, the closely related Scottish sport of shinty, and versions of field hockey played in England. Where necessary, these seem to have been adapted for icy conditions. Early paintings show "shinney", an early form of hockey with no standard rules, being played in Nova Scotia, Canada.
Thomas Chandler Haliburton, in The Attache: Second Series, published in 1844, reminisced about boys from King's College School in Windsor, Nova Scotia, playing "hurly on the long pond on the ice" when he was a student there, no later than 1810. To this day, shinny (or shinney) (derived from Shinty) is a popular Canadian term for an informal type of hockey, either on ice or as street hockey. These early games may have also absorbed the physically aggressive aspects of what the Mi'kmaq in Nova Scotia called dehuntshigwa'es (lacrosse).
In 1825 Sir John Franklin wrote that "The game of hockey played on the ice was the morning sport" while on Great Bear Lake during one of his Arctic expeditions. In 1843 a British Army officer in Kingston, Ontario in Canada, wrote "Began to skate this year, improved quickly and had great fun at hockey on the ice."[8] An article in the Boston Evening Gazette, in 1859, makes reference to an early game of hockey on ice occurring in Halifax in that year.
The first recorded hockey games were played by British soldiers stationed in Kingston and Halifax during the mid-1850s. In the 1870s, the first known set of ice hockey rules were drawn up by students at Montreal's McGill University. These rules established the number of players per side to 9 and replaced the ball with a wood puck.
Based on Haliburton's writings, there have been claims that modern ice hockey originated in Windsor, Nova Scotia, by Kings College students and was named after an individual, as in "Colonel Hockey's game".
According to the Society for International Hockey Research, the word puck is derived from the Scottish and Gaelic word "puc" or the Irish word "poc", meaning to poke, punch or deliver a blow. This definition is explained in a book published in 1910 entitled "English as we Speak it in Ireland" by P. W. Joyce. It defines the word puck as "... The blow given by a hurler to the ball with his caman or hurley is always called a puck".
| 14 |
| Vote |
Add To: 
subscribe to this blog
