2001: A Hockey Odyssey in Germany

Originally published in Rinkside in 2001

By Lucas Aykroyd

The late Stanley Kubrick won’t be filming the 2001 IIHF World Hockey Championships in Germany, but you can expect the action to be of epic proportions on and off the ice. With a fun-loving extraterrestrial named “Spacy” as the tournament mascot, at least 250,000 spectators are expected to attend the 56 games in Hannover, Cologne and Nuremberg. From April 28 to May 13, hockey fans around the globe will keenly await the crowning of a new world champion as well as following the NHL playoffs.

It’s an opportune time for the host nation to step into the limelight. Germany edged out Kazakhstan at the B Pool Championships in Katowice, Poland last April to win a place in the top group. So the opening game of the 2001 tournament will pit Germany against Switzerland, a classic cross-border rivalry.

“I think it’s a great thing for Germany,” says Jörg Schreiber, a sports journalist with Döbelner Allgemeine in Leipzig. “Over the last five or seven years, we were pretty bad. If we can stay in the first group, that would be a big success for us.”

In total, 16 countries will take part. Group A includes the Czech Republic, Switzerland, Belarus and Germany; Group B has Finland, Slovakia, Austria and Japan; Group C features Sweden, the USA, Latvia and Ukraine; and Group D has Canada, Russia, Norway and Italy.

The International Ice Hockey Federation has decided to spice up the championships system. Starting in 2001, what was formerly called the “A Pool” will simply be known as the “World Championships.” The B, C and D Pools will be converted into Division I and Division II. Each year, two teams will be relegated to Division I and two will be promoted to the World Championships. There will be 40 teams altogether in the system.

The IIHF is making other changes in terms of faceoffs and line changes this year to keep the games moving along. Teams will only get five seconds each to change players after a stoppage in play, with the visiting team going first. Then they will have five seconds to line up for the faceoff. The referee will hand delay-of-game penalties to any players who don’t get in position quickly enough after one verbal warning.

Scratching your head as you try to keep up with all the changes? Here’s something about the history of the World Championships in Germany that you can easily grasp: before the 1960’s, Canada used to win, but since then, it’s been Russia all the way. Let’s check out the highlight reel.

In 1930, Germany wasn’t supposed to host the World Championships, but warm weather in Chamonix, France left the ice in bad shape, so the final games were played in Berlin. The move paid off for the Germans, who beat Switzerland 2-1 to claim the European title. However, they fell 6-1 to Canada in the World Championship game.

In 1936, the World and European Championships were combined with the Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. This tournament was marred by controversy. Canada protested the number of Canadian-born players representing France and Great Britain, but failed to get its rivals disqualified. In the gold medal game, Canada lost 2-1 to the British. German finished an unremarkable fifth.

Four West German cities hosted the 1955 World Championships, which turned into a Cold War grudge match. The Soviet Union had won its first-ever title at the 1954 tournament in Stockholm, and Canada was out for revenge on the Big Red Machine. The Penticton Vees pounded Russian star Vsevolod Bobrov in their climactic 5-0 victory, ending up with a record of 8-0.

1975 brought the championships to Munich and Dusseldorf. As described in Vladislav Tretiak’s book The Hockey I Love, the Soviet national team paid its traditional visit to the Blue Room of the newspaper Pravda the day before leaving. The journalists gave them the puck with which the Soviets had won the 1964 championships and asked them to bring back the winning puck from West Germany. The gimmick worked, as the Soviets claimed the gold with a 10-0 record, scoring 90 goals and allowing just 23.

In 1983, the Russians iced one of their strongest lineups ever in Dortmund, Dusseldorf and Munich. They easily won their nineteenth title, tying Canada’s record. Vladimir Krutov, Igor Larionov, Sergei Makarov, Viacheslav Fetisov, Alexei Kasatonov and Tretiak claimed all spots on the tournament all-star team. West Germany earned 11 points to East Germany’s six.

At the 1993 tournament, Boris Mikhailov took over the coaching reins of the Russian national team from incumbent dictator Viktor Tikhonov. Despite Eric Lindros’s tournament-leading 17 points for Canada, Russia ended up beating Sweden in the finals. Germany finished a surprising fifth, ahead of both the USA and Finland.

This April, budding homegrown wunderkinds like Thomas Greilinger, Marcel Goc, Christian Ehrhoff and Andreas Schubert may get to strut their stuff for the national team. But German fans will also hope the San Jose Sharks, Washington Capitals and St. Louis Blues don’t go far in the NHL playoffs. That would free up three key NHLers, Marco Sturm, Jochen Hecht and Olaf Kolzig, to play for Germany on home ice.

Those three have enjoyed varying amounts of international success. One of Sturm’s career highlights was winning a silver medal at the European Junior Championships in 1996. Hecht represented Germany as a 19-year-old at the 1996 World Cup, and his squad pulled off a 7-1 shocker over the Czech Republic. Kolzig was also on that team. All of them suited up for Germany’s ninth-place team at the 1998 Olympics.

“Everybody is happy about hosting the championships in 2001,” says Sturm. “There’s lots of excitement. I think they’re going to fill the rinks.”

There should be no worries about the ice melting this time. Spectators will enjoy the same red carpet treatment NHL fans expect at their home arenas. In fact, this will be the first time in the history of the IIHF World Championships that all arenas will boast the latest technology. The combined seating capacity of the three venues is around 40,000, so there’s a chance of breaking the record of 526,000 spectators, set in Finland in 1997.

Most glamorous is the Kölnarena in Cologne, a glass-walled events complex on the Rhine extending over 83,600 square meters. It is the biggest hockey arena in Europe and has attracted more than 18,000 fans to some games. Since September 1998, it has been the home of the Cologne Sharks, the local German League franchise. There should be a packed house for the opening ceremonies on April 28.

Hannover hosted the World’s Fair in 2000, and its Preussag Arena was inaugurated last spring at the EXPO-Plaza. To borrow a phrase from Hannover’s favorite hard rockers, the Scorpions, it should “rock you like a hurricane.” With a capacity of 12,500, it’s the site of the annual Deutschland Cup. “We’ve signed a contract that guarantees the continuation of that tournament in this venue for the next five years,” says Franz Reindl, sport director of the German Ice Hockey Federation. The 2001 finals will be here on May 12 and 13.

Slated for completion in January, the 9,000-seat Nuremberg Arena will be the site of 14 preliminary and relegation round games. The enthusiastic Bavarian fans should turn out in droves to watch neighbors like Switzerland and Austria go at it. After the World Championships, the arena will become the home of the Nuremberg Ice Tigers.

If anyone loses a tooth in the heat of the action, well, it couldn’t be better timing. The IIHF is sponsoring the First International Symposium on Dentistry in Sport in Cologne during the championships in early May.

Tournament tickets went on sale in July 2000, with prices ranging from a low of 28 DM ($8.50 US) for preliminary action to a high of 685 DM ($300) for a luxury package in the finals. By way of comparison, the average NHL ticket price for 2000-01 is $47.69.

Between games, the flood of visitors is expected to create an economic bonanza for Hannover, Cologne and Nuremberg. Hannover, a city of 520,000 inhabitants, already attracts a lot of trade fair business, and boasts such sights as the internationally renowned Opernhaus and the baroque park of Herrenhausen, the royal summer palace of the Hannoverian rulers of England in the eighteenth century. Cologne, which was 90 percent destroyed during World War II bombing, has rebounded as a metropolis of 1,000,000 today. Its attractions range from Roman antiquities and a spectacular Gothic cathedral to packed nightclubs and jazz concerts in the Old Town. Nuremberg, Bavaria’s second-largest city with 500,000 people, is famous for the German National Museum, the Kaiserburg of the Holy Roman Emperors and the home of painter Albrecht Dürer, as well as other amusements of the oompah variety.

Fans who can’t get to Germany will be able to follow the games on TV or the Internet. The IIHF has almost 40 years of experience in televising hockey, dating back to the black-and-white coverage of the 1961 tournament in Switzerland, and millions will be watching. Last year, the official Internet site of the championships, IHWC.NET, got more than 42 million hits in two weeks.

There will be a million storylines and a galaxy of stars to watch in Germany. Can the Czech Republic become the first nation to win three straight world titles since the Soviet Union pulled it off from 1981 to 1983? Will Russia bounce back from its worst results ever since it began participating in the World Championships in 1954? And who will step up to defend North America’s honor: Canada, who fell one goal short in both the semifinals and the bronze medal game last year, or the USA, whose spirited play carried them past the Russians and the Swedes in St. Petersburg?

“The refereeing was probably the biggest thing for us,” says Vancouver Canucks defenseman Adrian Aucoin, who played for Canada in Russia. “We’re used to playing run-and-gun hockey, and you just can’t do that over there. You have to tone it down a notch. And the size of the ice surface was a factor. Sometimes you don’t realize how much time you actually do have with the puck. But if you just stay disciplined and play solid North American hockey, you’ll be all right.”

The script could unfold many ways. That’s because new hockey powers are emerging. Switzerland’s tactically sound play last year made believers out of a lot of NHL scouts, and so three Swiss players cracked NHL rosters this season for the first time: David Aebischer with Colorado, Reto Von Arx with Chicago and Michel Riesen with Edmonton. Latvia’s eighth-place finish belied the heart and determination they showed, right from star netminder Arturs Irbe to the youngest player in the tournament, Janis Sprukts (drafted 234th overall by the Florida Panthers in June). The silver-winning Slovaks, of course, made the biggest leap forward. And you can’t discount the impact of the home crowd cheering on Germany, who may get to play the role of the spoiler.

Undoubtedly, there’ll be some Academy Award-winning dives, some lopsided scores that look like a B horror movie, and the sad spectacle of golden dreams left on the cutting room floor.

But you’ll also see the incredible exultation on the face of the team captain who accepts the championship trophy from IIHF President René Fasel. It’s an exultation that proclaims: “Today, we have the best national hockey team in the world.”

And at that moment, you won’t need Jurgen Prochnow or Erich von Stroheim to tell you: “That guy’s not acting.” This hockey odyssey will be over.