Germany hands Canada stunning defeat

GANGNEUNG, South Korea — It has been a rough few days for Canada because of struggles in the two sports that are most tightly woven into its national identity.

In perhaps the biggest blow of all, the men’s hockey team didn’t even make it to the final courtesy of a 4-3 loss to Germany on Friday night in the semifinals. For a nation already in despair over no men’s or women’s curling medals and the women’s hockey team losing to the rival Americans in a shootout in the gold-medal game, this one won’t be easy to swallow as Canada’s bid to win three consecutive Olympic golds fell horribly short.

“They came out ready to play,” Canada forward Rob Klinkhammer said. “We didn’t. They were the better team.”

Canada was skated out of the building by coach Marco Sturm’s team that now faces an even stiffer test in the favored Russians in Sunday’s final. Canada will play the Czech Republic for bronze on Saturday.

Brooks Macek, Matthias Plachta, Frank Mauer and Patrick Hager scored for Germany, which led 3-0 and 4-1.

Canada’s Gilbert Brule scored in the second and Matt Robinson and Derek Roy scored in the third to cut the lead to 4-3.

Goaltender Vasily Koshechkin stopped all 31 shots he faced to put the “Olympic Athletes from Russia” into the final with a victory over the Czech Republic on Friday. The favored Russians scored only twice on 19 shots against Czech goalie Pavel Francouz and Koshechkin did the rest. Nikita Gusev and Vladislav Gavrikov scored goals 27 seconds apart in the second period. Ilya Kovalchuk added an empty-netter with 20.9 seconds left.