Everything You Need to Know About Ice Hockey

Washingtonpost.com

How It Plays Venues 1998 Golds Critical Moment

Nuts & Bolts History Schedules U.S. Outlook

Others to Watch Looking Back at Nagano Medalists

Venues: The Peaks Ice Arena is in Provo, 51 miles from the Olympic village. The E Centre, in West Valley City some 8 miles from the centre of Salt Lake City, is home to the Utah Grizzlies, an International Hockey League team, and holds 10,451 spectators.

1998 Golds: The Czech Republic won the men's tournament while the United States won the women's gold.

Critical Moment: A quick score can come after an end-zone face-off. When an official drops the puck between two opposing players, the offensive player tries to control the puck, pass it to a teammate for a shot on goal.

KRT

Infractions Players are sent off the ice for two-, five- or 10-minute penalties. If the penalty is serious, the player may be suspended for the remainder of the game. Here are the most common penalties: Tripping: Tripping a player with a stick, foot or hand. Elbowing: Checking an opponent with an elbow. High sticking: Raising a stick above shoulder level against an opponent. Slashing: Using the stick to strike or swing at an opponent. Hooking: Constraining an opponent with a stick.

Nuts & Bolts: The men's tournament features 14 teams and is played over three rounds — preliminary, final round and playoff round. The top six teams from the 1998 Games qualified directly. They are Czech Republic, Russia, Finland, Canada, Sweden and the United States. They will be joined by Slovakia and Switzerland, as qualifiers from the 1999 world championships, and six teams who went through Olympic qualifying tournaments—Belarus, Austria, Latvia, Ukraine, France and Germany.

History: Although Canadian hockey teams traveled to the United States to play exhibition games in the late 1800s, the United States did not compete against teams from outside of North America until 1920. That year, the Americans made their debut at the Antwerp Olympics. Led by hockey Hall of Famer Francis "Moose" Goheen, Team USA won the silver medal, its lone loss coming against Canada. In 1924, the Americans repeated as silver medalists at the Chamonix Olympics.

Until the creation of the United States Amateur Hockey Association in 1920, amateur hockey had been controlled by the International Skating Union. The USAHA disbanded at the end of the 1925-26 season and left amateur hockey in the United States without a governing body until 1930 when the Amateur Athletic Union took over. During that period of instability, the U.S. missed the 1928 Olympics and 1930 World Championship.

The United States rebounded at the 1932 Games, held in Lake Placid, N.Y., to win another silver medal. The United States won back-to-back silver medals at the 1952 and 1956 Winter Olympics, and at the 1960 Games in Squaw Valley, Calif., the Americans beat Canada and the Soviet Union on their way to the gold medal.

The victory at Squaw Valley is credited with prompting a tremendous growth of the sport in the United States as high school programs began feeding increasingly skilled players into the college hockey system.

The Americans won a silver medal at the 1972 Olympics, and eight years later the United States battled its way to a gold medal at the 1980 Olympics in Lake Placid.

Professionals were allowed to compete for the first time at the 1998 Nagano Games.

Women's hockey, which has been played as far back as 1916, joined its male counterpart on the international scene in 1990 with the advent of the first IIHF Women's World Championship. Women's ice hockey made its Olympic debut at the 1998 Games.

Schedules: Men's and women's

U.S. Outlook: Herb Brooks can’t recreate the “Miracle on Ice,” mostly because the Soviet Union doesn’t exist anymore. And now NHL All-Stars fill the rosters of several countries, leaving the United States with its work cut out for it if it hopes to medal. One thing’s for sure, though — U.S. hockey players probably won’t trash their rooms as they did after losing in Nagano. The American team includes goalies Mike Richter and Tom Barrasso, forwards Mike Modano, Brett Hull and Keith Tkachuk and defensemen Brian Leetch and Chris Chelios.

Things are more clear-cut on the women’s side, where the U.S. team goes for a second gold. Captain Cammi Granato is among 14 returning members of the U.S. team, which was not only 28-0-0 in pre-Olympic play through mid-January, but were also 8-0-0 against Canada, the team they probably will face in the finals. In a Jan. 22 game against China, they won 16-0.

Others to Watch: Men — Rosters are crammed with NHL stars, including goaltender Dominik Hasik, the six-time Vezina Trophy winner who helped the Czech Republic win gold in Nagano. No team has more pressure than Canada, which last won Olympic gold in 1952. Executive director Wayne Gretzky, a member of Canada’s fourth-place team at Nagano, has assembled an impressive roster of NHL players hoping to end that drought, led by Mario Lemieux, Joe Sakic, Rob Blake, Chris Pronger and Steve Yzerman.

Women — Canada is the main competition for the Americans. Finland was the bronze medalist in Nagano.

Looking Back at Nagano: The United States took home the gold as women's hockey made its Olympic debut. After a 3-1 championship victory over Canada, Team USA exploded in wild celebration as the deflated Canadian team looked on.

After the medal ceremony, Canadian Shannon Miller noted that, “when they showed the [U.S. forward] Cammi Granato’s face on the big screen and the Olympic gold medal going around her neck, my feelings changed quickly inside me. And I had a feeling of joy going through my body because what I realized was that an Olympic gold medal is being hung around a female hockey player.”

On the men’s side, Dominik Hasek of the Czech Republic recorded 20 saves in the championship match. Russian goalie Mikhail Shtalenkov also got 20 saves in the game. The only problem for the Russians was that Czechoslovakia took 21 shots.

The game’s lone goal came off the stick of Petr Svoboda, his only goal of the Olympics. Back in Czechoslovakia, 130,000 spectators had gathered to watch the game on three enormous televisions in the Old Town Square. There would have been more, but police had to set up barricades to prevent people from coming in.

Medalists (Men)

Year	Gold	Silver	Bronze
1920	Canada	United States	Czechoslovakia
1924	Canada	United States	Great Britain
1928	Canada	Sweden	Switzerland
1932	Canada	United States	Germany
1936	Great Britain	Canada	United States
1948	Canada	Czechoslovakia	Switzerland
1952	Canada	United States	Sweden
1956	USSR	United States	Canada
1960	United States	Canada	USSR
1964	USSR	Sweden	Czechoslovakia
1968	USSR	Czechoslovakia	Canada
1972	USSR	United States	Czechoslovakia
1976	USSR	Czechoslovakia	West Germany
1980	United States	USSR	Sweden
1984	USSR	Czechoslovakia	Sweden
1988	USSR	Finland	Sweden
1992	Unified Team	Canada	Czechoslovakia
1994	Sweden	Canada	Finland
1998	Czech Republic	Russia	Finland

Medalists (Women)

Year	Gold	Silver	Bronze
1998	United States	Canada	Finland