Olympic hockey now a long way from amateur
The French, comme d’habitude, have le mot juste to describe something. The case at hand is the word “amateur.” For those born with an anglo tongue, “amateur” means many things, from the affirmative - “she’s an amateur historian,” to the less flattering, often referring to one with dubious claims to professional competence - “What an amateur!”
The French, however, have a definition of the word that traces directly to its Latin roots - amare, meaning to love. So, when a francophone says “il est un vrai amateur de sports” it means that person is passionate about a sport. In English, they’d say a sports “fan,” as in “fanatic,” which implies a somewhat more aggressive degree of support for a given sports entity.
All this etymology to say Canadians may be pondering the meaning of “amateur” as they wrench their minds from the wretched weather and start to pay attention to the 2018 Winter Olympic Games in Pyeongchang less than a month from now.
These games will be the first since the Calgary Olympics in 1988 in which players signed to National Hockey League contracts will not be participating. The NHL bosses made the decision on the basis the tournament has become too much of a disruption for the regular season.
More importantly, seeing that NHL teams are businesses, is the fact the International Olympic Committee has refused to cover the costs of sending teams over to South Korea. As it stands now, it’s unlikely the NHL will change its mind for the 2022 winter games in Beijing, although the IOC is already lobbying hard to reverse that stance.
League Commissioner Gary Bettman has hinted the NHL might reconsider if future games are held in North America. At the moment, the only cities on this side of the pond mulling a bid for the 2026 Games are Calgary and Salt Lake City.
Those of a certain age will recall the prolonged battle Canada waged with Olympic officials to drop the pretense of amateur purity and allow NHL players in the games. Given that the Russians - Soviets at the time - were notorious for stacking their so-called amateur national teams with players who trained full-time on the country’s payroll, the playing field, or rather the rink, was hardly level.
The issue came to a head in 1970 when Canada withdrew from all international competition to protest the IOC and International Ice Hockey Federation’s refusal to consider opening competition to all players regardless of amateur or professional status.
Canada did return to international play eight years later, having taken a pass on the Olympics of 1972 and 1976, when international hockey authorities agreed to ease the rules to accommodate the greatest hockey power on earth.
Canada’s last technically amateur team, where there were still restrictions on NHL players, put up a brave fight, despite the continued rule-bending of Russia and other countries in the 1984 Games in Sarajevo, in former Yugoslavia. That team, including future or marginal NHL players like Russ Courtnall, Kirk Muller, Kevin Dineen, J.J. Daignault and Mario Gosselin, finished fourth in the tournament, losing in the final round to both the Soviets and the Swedes.
The 1984 gold medal marked the sixth top finish for the Russians, tying Canada’s record to that point, spanning an era from the first Olympic hockey tournament in 1920, during the Summer Games in Belgium, to 1952, in Oslo.
(On a point of trivia, the first European team to win Olympic gold in hockey was Great Britain, in 1936.)
There was a time when the Olympic movement guarded its amateur status with the same kind of devotion to honour that led to duels at 10-paces - never an Olympic sport, to my knowledge.
Nowadays, the only Olympic “amateurs” are those of the French variety meaning fans. Pretty much all competitors, from skeleton to speed skating, receive some form of compensation for their efforts, mostly from the national team budget, or from commercial endorsements.
In an ironic counterpoint to the years when Canada was forbidden to use NHL players, the 25-member national team announced last week has only three players currently playing in Canada - all the rest play in Europe and Russia. None of them, of course, are amateurs. The Record welcomes your letters to the editor. Please limit your letters to 300 words. We reserve the right to edit for length, clarity, legality and taste. Please ensure there is a phone number or email where you can be reached, to confirm authorship and current town/city of residence. Names will not be withheld but the address and phone number of the writer are not published, except by request.
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