Olympic Update: Teams Dropping Out of Hockey Competition

Posted by Cynical Sarah on February 9, 2006

After a brutal opening weekend for the women’s hockey at the Olympics, a few countries are opting to drop out of the competition.

During Saturday’s game against Italy, the Canadian team came out on top with 16-0 victory. Similarly the U.S. team topped the Swiss with a 9-0 victory. Sunday was just as brutal with Canada downing the Russian team 12-0 and the U.S. over the Germans 5-0.

“As much as we want to compete, we don’t want to humiliate our women either,” said Italian coach Cecilia Sasparilli. “We feel it’s necessary to withdraw our team in the face of such daunting opponents.”

Switzerland and the Russians are also opting to not continue into the final round.

“The last thing we want is for teams to give up on their Olympic dreams,” said International Olympic Committee President Jacque Rogge. “We may have to rethink how we’re doing the hockey competition.”

Currently, they keep track of the total goals a team scores throughout the competition to determine final standings and also if they have a tie in the final games.

“We’re not trying to run up scores,” said Canadian Melody Davidson. “But with this system, every goal counts. Plus we don’t want to start slacking on the easy teams and then lose our edge for the harder ones.”

The teams that are dropping out agree that the dominant teams should keep scoring and not let up on them.

“We want them to play their best against us. It does our team a disservice if they don’t,” Sasparilli said. “Perhaps they should take a look at the system though and find a way that doesn’t encourage such huge score differences though.”

Some people are beginning to compare women’s hockey at the Olympics to what happened when professional basketball players were allowed to compete in the summer Olympics.

“The U.S. ended up being so dominant for years because of that. It took a long time for other countries to catch up to that level of talent,” said the IOC president. “People are saying it will be the same with women’s hockey because of the depth of talent coming out of some countries, and the others are lucky if they even have women who know how to play.”

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