Nedved wrapping up storied hockey journey

There’s grey in the beard, lines around the eyes and that once youthful cockiness has given way to a detached bemusement.

But make no mistake. There, wearing the jersey of the Czech Republic, is Petr Nedved.

At 42, he’s not exactly an Olympic rookie, but he’s a first-time Olympian for the country of his birth.

“I knew you guys didn’t think I was still playing,” Nedved said to a group of Canadian journalists who made the trek to see him on Friday. “Here I am.” With a helluva story to tell. Nedved was a surprise selection to the Czech side in Sochi — and that’s putting it mildly. Now in his seventh season in the Czech elite league, the last six with Liberec, he got the nod over established NHLers Jiri Hudler and Radim Vrbata.

And that’s only a small part of this wondrous tale.

Nedved last played an Olympic game 20 years ago in Lillehammer, wearing the Team Canada uniform and holding out with the Vancouver Canucks. That was five years after he defected from thenCzechoslovakia at the Mac’s midget tournament in Calgary to play for the WHL’s Seattle Thunderbirds — and just 10 months before the Velvet Revolution changed the political regime in his country. Now, here he is. “My whole life has been a strange journey,” Nedved said. “I never thought at the end of my career, after 20 years, I would go to the Olympic Games. This is kind of a nice way to end my career.”

And a fairly eventful journey.

Nedved’s odyssey started in January 1989, when he defected from Czechoslovakia in a Calgary police station, subsequently went to Seattle and became the first-round pick (second overall) of the Canucks in the rich 1990 draft.

Nedved was supposed to be a franchise centreman, a gamechanger. If it didn’t quite work out that way, he still played 982 NHL games and scored 310 goals while toiling for eight teams over 15 seasons.

Included in there was that turn with Team Canada at the ’94 Olympics, where he helped bounce the Czechs from the tournament in the quarterfinal before losing to Sweden in the gold-medal game.

“Before the tournament I was kind of hoping that wouldn’t happen,” he says.

After a dismal 2006-07 campaign split among the Philadelphia Flyers, the AHL’s Philadelphia Phantoms and the Edmonton Oilers, Nedved returned to his native country to play with Sparta, before landing in Liberec with his hometown team. There, he became a local star.

And now, here he is in Sochi.

“I never thought this day would come and especially at my age,” he says.