Women won’t play any games until Olympics
Canada’s women’s hockey team won’t play any more games before the Winter Olympics and will enter a bubble to ensure players can board a plane to Beijing in less than a month.
The women have yet to reunite as a full team since COVID-19 infiltrated their ranks in December.
“I’ve got about half of our group back with us and the other half joining us here shortly,” said Gina Kingsbury, Hockey Canada’s director of hockey operations. “Everyone is doing very well. We’re all double-vaccinated.”
Canada’s Olympic women’s hockey roster has yet to be named. The team opens the preliminary round Feb. 2 against Switzerland two days before Beijing’s opening ceremony.
Everyone travelling to Beijing for the Olympic Games must test negative in two pre-departure tests. If either test is positive, China says do not board the plane.
“We’re at a critical window of time right now leading into Beijing, so we’ve got to be extra careful,” Kingsbury said.
The two remaining Rivalry Series games against the United States and a game scheduled for next week against an Alberta Junior Hockey League men’s team will not be played.
“We want to play as much as possible, but with the 14-day window ahead of traveling to Beijing being such a critical and dangerous time frame, it’s not worth the risk to play any games and to bring in any external people into our environment.”
The 26 women remaining in centralization must be trimmed to 23 ahead of the Jan. 19 deadline for Hockey Canada to nominate its team to the Canadian Olympic Committee.
The U.S., which beat Canada 3-2 in a shootout for Olympic gold in 2018, unveiled its Beijing roster during Saturday’s NHL Winter Classic in Minneapolis with the players on hand at Target Field for the announcement.
The Canadians will sequester when they congregate in Calgary again.
“We’re looking at trying to secure our group as tight knit as we possibly can be here moving forward, have everyone on site and protect ourselves as much as we can so that everyone is eligible to go to China and compete at the Games,” Kingsbury said.
“We’re looking at bubbling our group, kind of something similar to what we did before world championships. We’ll be really restricted to the hotel, the rink and that’s pretty much it and we’ll make sure that we’re avoiding anyone outside of our group and even being very careful with one another in our group as well.
“The on-ice piece, we can’t avoid that. We have to practise as a team, we’ve got to compete as a team.”
Canada and the U.S. played six Rivalry Series games, with Canada winning the last two in overtime — Dec. 15 and Dec. 17 in St. Louis — to improve to 4-1-1 in the series.
The Canadian women flew charter flights to games in the U.S. to avoid mixing with the public on commercial airlines, Kingsbury said.