A Double, With Ice

It’s all very imperial. One dynasty succeeding another.

There’s nothing democratic about international women’s hockey. No open voting, no equal access.

It’s been Canada and the United States. In that order. And that’s all.

Canada has won the seven World Championships that have been played since 1990. The United States won the inaugural Olympic women’s hockey tournament at Nagano in 1998. The Americans had to beat Canada twice, once in the gold-medal game, 3-1.

In their most recent medal competition, Canada won the World Championships last April at Minneapolis, beating Sweden, Russia and Kazakhstan by a combined score of 29-1 before squeezing out a 3-2 victory over the U.S. The Americans beat Germany, China, Finland and Russia by a combined score of 41-1. Kind of makes you want to hit the snooze button through the preliminary rounds of the Olympics, doesn’t it?

The Swedish team even contemplated staying home.

“To go to the Olympic Games and just lose is no fun,” Swedish Olympic Committee President Stefan Lindeberg said in November.

But they decided to come and take their punishment.

Since absorbing that loss in the World Championships, the Americans have been winning and winning and winning. Their series of international exhibitions was dubbed the Skate to Salt Lake Tour. At this rate, it looks as though the U.S. women will skate through Salt Lake. They are 30-0 on the tour, eight of those victories over Canada.

“I think the big thing is that the Americans are playing with a lot of passion--for obvious reasons,” Canadian forward Cassie Campbell said after their most recent loss to the United States.

“I’ve said all along that I’m glad to be the underdog. We’ve been the favorites for my whole career. We have nothing to lose. We aren’t even the defending champions going into Salt Lake.”

So is that to say the pressure is on the Americans?

“I don’t think we feel pressure,” U.S. defenseman A.J. Mleczko said. “We have a different team.”

Not entirely. Thirteen of the 1998 gold-medal winners are back. But there’s definitely a youth movement going on, what with the addition of 16-year-old Lyndsay Wall.

The United States has never lost to a country other than Canada. It has been tied twice by Finland.

The Canadians are 35-0 in the World Championships and have only the two losses to the United States in Nagano to blemish their record in medal competition.

Why such dominance by the two teams?

For one thing, consider the head start.

There are records of women’s hockey games being played in Canada as far back as 1892. (Although research showed the game featured women playing against men dressed as women. Not only was this about 70 years before women’s teams formed in Europe and Asia, it was more than 100 years before Dennis Rodman thought of cross-dressing.)

Then there’s volume. There are more than 42,000 women and girls participating in hockey in the United States, according to USA Hockey.

Contrast that to China. The world’s most populous nation, with 1.3 billion people, has about 100 females playing hockey. But that won’t keep the Chinese from sending a team to compete in Salt Lake City.

“Compete” being a relative word, of course.