- The NHL looks set to send its best players to China in February for the men’s ice hockey competition, which will be the showpiece event of the Games
- China has found an unlikely ally to counter a boycott movement in the world’s best ice hockey players as representing your country is deeply embedded within the game
Growing up in East Vancouver in the 1960s, Barry Beck was embedded with ice hockey culture from day one. The 64-year-old, who has lived in Hong Kong since 2007 and worked as a coach, played more than 600 games in the National Hockey League before retiring in 1990.
Beck said from a very young age, there were two goals for a Canadian hockey player, dreams kids fantasised about from the moment they could lace up skates and head onto a sheet of ice.
“Besides winning the Stanley Cup,” said Beck, referring to the NHL’s championship trophy, “the next biggest honour and accolade for many players was playing for your country.”
International ice hockey has a long and storied history, dating back to the 1972 Summit Series between Canada and the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War, as well as the “Miracle on Ice” during the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid which saw a team of amateur Americans beat political rival powerhouse team the “Red Army”.
NHL players have taken part in the Winter Olympics since 1998 and the men’s tournament has become the showpiece event of each Games, garnering substantial television ratings as a linchpin sponsorship selling point for the International Olympic Committee. The NHL is the sixth biggest league in the world in terms of revenue, right behind the English Premier League and many of its stars have multimillion dollar endorsement deals with international companies and brands.
Beck said this long and storied history for ice hockey players wanting to play for their country means after missing the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics in South Korea due to a number of logistical and revenue sharing, NHLers are keen to get back after signing a new collective bargaining agreement with the league.
“Winning an Olympic gold medal has become a big thing (for NHL players),” said Beck, who represented Canada at the 1981 Canada Cup. “And bringing that medal back to your country brings a lot of pride with it. So I think they felt bad about missing out (in Korea) and really wanted to play this time around.”
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“NHL players going definitely tempers that,” said Bruce Kidd, a Canadian academic and former track and field Olympian. “There’s not going to be a boycott, and it’s an ineffective way to bring light to these issues in the first place, so we need to look at other ways.”
Kidd recently penned an opinion piece in a Canadian news outlet that said there needs to be an open dialogue when it comes to any country’s alleged human rights violations that is hosting the Olympics, and China is no different.
“The Olympics have definitely become a form of soft diplomacy over the years,” he added. “And as we move forward there needs to be an increased emphasis on human rights when it comes to countries awarded the Games.”
As the NHL season continues right up until early February, North American journalists will soon broach similar questions to the players they cover: are they concerned about China’s alleged human rights abuses, and what do they feel about heading into an authoritative regime to play an ice hockey tournament?
“We all have these questions,” said Kidd. “But NHL players are not Colin Kaepernick, they are not LeBron James, their history is not speaking out on social issues. They have begun to speak out on racism, but very much the last to do that, so it will be very interesting when journalists begin to ask them those questions.”
Kidd clarified their silence doesn’t mean NHL players are not political or concerned with issues at home or abroad, nor are they anti-human rights, but in comparison to the NBA and NFL have not made social justice campaigns part of their platform to nearly the same degree.
In 2016 former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick knelt during the US anthem before a preseason game, kicking off a heated debate in the US about freedom of speech. James, a multimillionaire athlete, has taken public stances on a number of domestic issues in the US throughout his career in the NBA.
03:03
Does China’s ice hockey squad face an Olympic-sized embarrassment at 2022 Winter Games in Beijing?
Simon Chadwick, a professor of Eurasian Sport at the Emlyon Business School said this is exactly part of the plan when it comes to Beijing 2022 for the host nation.
“Ultimately this will become a Chinese Games for Chinese people and in some ways this will suit the Chinese government, because there will be no one to disrupt the message. There will be no one to cause turbulence around some of the more contentious issues. Obviously there will be athletes and the media and commercial partners there, but movements will be heavily restricted.”
NHL players are used to competing in bubble scenarios as they went into two camps in Canada to finish the 2019-20 season, and the 2020-21 season was reformatted due to the Covid-19 pandemic into regional divisions. Media availability for the NHL players will surely become a contentious issue at Beijing 2022 as multiple international broadcasters in both North American and Europe, where ice hockey is popular, will want to conduct interviews with the players before and after games.
Chadwick said if the CCP tries to muzzle the athletes it may further damage its international image and reputation at a very precarious time in geopolitical history.
“The prevailing view of China in the West at the moment is not especially positive,” he said. “And if China actively seeks to counter the narrative, on one hand they have the opportunity to show a different face of China, but in another way it could antagonise Western audiences. This is not simply just about staging an event, I think China as a nation is on trial, and will be subject to scrutiny in lots of different ways.”
The NHL has largely gone back to normal for its 2021-22 season, with teams travelling throughout North America and most arenas back to full capacity for games in both Canada and the US. Covid-19 protocols have been integrated and a few players have missed games, however only a small number of games have been postponed because of the pandemic and the league’s vaccination rate is above 99 per cent.
China is also dealing with increased tensions with a plethora of Western nations, most notably a trade war former Republic president Donald Trump poured kerosene on in 2018. However tensions with other nations have simmered, most notably the Huawei Meng Wanzhou saga, which saw Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor freed in China immediately after Meng was released from Canadian custody and returned to the mainland.
Lindsay Meredith, professor emeritus in marketing for Simon Fraser University’s Beedie School of Business said the Huawei saga coming to an end takes the heat off Canadian NHL players heading to Beijing who may have been pressed by journalists to answer questions on that diplomatic stalemate, however China still has a number of issues that could cause trouble for them.
Meredith said the CCP’s number one priority should be making sure the NHL and its players are happy with the idea of heading to China and into a controversial setting to play hockey and roll out the red carpet for them, because the alternative could be disastrous.
“If the NHL pulls out it could start a domino effect in terms of a late stage boycott,” said Meredith, noting the league has a contingency plan that allows the NHL to pull out due to Covid-19 concerns, but it may be activated for political reasons. “These Olympics could turn out to be vitally important for China creating an international win right now, because it surely has a lot of losses lately.”
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If CCP president Xi Jinping is looking to soften his image, said Meredith, the leader appearing at internationally televised ice hockey games, acting jovial and approachable, may be a good way to counter a prevailing narrative about him in Western media that he is an iron fisted ruler.
“At this point in time it‘s the only golden goose they have, and 100 per cent he needs to do the smile and the wave because he’s got a lot of people worldwide who are quite nervous about him. So he needs to repair his image, if China has a bad geopolitical image right now, he’s got a worse one, and the Olympics is a perfect way to try and clean it up.”
Canadian Guy Cloutier, the CEO of CTC Group Ltd., which has built numerous ice rinks and winter sports infrastructure projects all over Asia for decades, said he was approached and presented a plan in November of 2020 to the General Administration of Sport in China about helping the men’s team improve its quality of play along with growing the game domestically, however revamping the sport in the country has now been tabled until after the Olympics.
Cloutier said when China was awarded the 2022 Winter Olympics back in 2015, they had no idea how important the men’s ice hockey competition was, and by the time the right people in the government figured that out it was too late. “It takes a generation to put these things in place,” said Cloutier.
The International Ice Hockey Federation flirted with the idea of pulling China’s men‘s team right up until November, however it appears they will compete in the star studded tournament. China’s team, which will not have a single NHL player, will be up against superstars such as Canadian Connor McDavid, widely regarded as the best player on the planet, American Auston Matthews, arguably the world’s best goal scorer and German Leon Draisaitl, seen as the second best player in the world.
Cloutier said you may see other teams adjusting to playing against a less than stellar Chinese team, however it could still turn into an embarrassingly public mess, broadcast live, at games in which Xi may attend in his soft diplomacy push.
“I would think whoever plays China may go a bit slower,” said Cloutier. “They may lift their foot a bit, 15-0 isn’t that bad, if you look back at scores, 25-0 were common in the past when Canada was playing countries like Switzerland. So something like 10-0 is not that bad for them, it would be much more embarrassing for them to get kicked out and lose face, and that would have some consequences.”
However if China is able to keep controversy to a minimum, the men’s ice hockey tournament should swallow up a large amount of press in the lead up to the Games as journalists and pundits focus on the key matchups, who will make their home country’s teams, and what ramifications this will have on the NHL season in terms of injuries and specific players.
Canadian Fabian Joseph, the captain of the 1994 Olympic team in Lillehammer, Norway that won silver, said the “Miracle on Ice” that took place in 1980 is still etched in his memory. He said playing internationally, which he did at two Olympics, was a childhood dream, and one woven into his cultural upbringing as a young boy growing up in Nova Scotia on the east coast of Canada.
“It means so much to represent your country in the Olympics because you are not only representing one sport for your country but part of the Canadian team of all sports,” he said. “You are also representing your family, community, city and province.”
However he said the ice hockey players heading to Beijing will have one thing on their minds, winning gold, and will leave the political talk to other bodies.
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“Once they arrive in the Olympic Village, they will be totally focused on the Olympic Games.”
Kidd, who competed for Canada in the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo in track and field, said this unlikely alliance between the CCP and the world’s best ice hockey players is a fragile one, and China needs to understand these athletes are there to win medals, not to show support for China. The saving grace, he said, for the host nation, is once the action starts at the puck drops, hockey will drown out politics.
“What always happens in every country is once the opening ceremony is held and the first competition starts, the contradictions stand still, and everyone focuses on the athletes.”
