Women's Hockey at the Olympics: Should it stay or should it go now?

Another Winter Olympics, another Canada/US Gold Medal game. With the exception of 2006 in Turin, when the Swedish team pulled a remarkable upset of the heavily-favoured Americans in the semi-finals, the 2010 Games in Vancouver marked yet another chapter in the ongoing trend of the two North American hockey superpowers meeting for Olympic Gold every four years - since women's hockey got the IOC stamp of approval and was introduced in 1998 in Nagano, Canada has won three Golds and one Silver, while the US has one Gold, two Silvers and one Bronze.

Talk about domination.

The lack of parity in international competition has led to a number of calls for women's hockey to be excluded from future Olympic competitions - much like women's softball in the Summer Games - and notable critics include IOC President Jacques Rogge:

"We cannot continue without improvement. There is a discrepancy there, everyone agrees with that. This is maybe the investment period in women's ice hockey. I would personally give them more time to grow - but there must be a period of improvement."

The primary issue is not (explicitly) about gender, but rather competitiveness. The issue of North American dominance has been present in international women's hockey since its World Championship debut in 1990. Canada and the US finished first and second respectively, until 2005 when the US finally won the tournament. No team has ever finished first or second except for the two superpowers. In fact, before the Swedish upset of the US in 2006, no team had ever beaten the US or Canada except for each other.

Supporters of Olympic women's hockey argue that the women's game needs the Olympics to grow the game and raise the quality of non-North American hockey. The reasoning behind this is that the Olympics serve as an incentive for national hockey federations to promote the game within their borders. As Jason Kay of The Hockey News writes:

"The Olympics, meantime, are the dangling carrot for national federations, providing heightened incentive to get better. Remove the carrot and the horse slows down. . . . Best-on-best competitions are critical for the embryonic hockey programs. It not only provides a measuring stick for executives, demonstrating how big the gap is between their programs and others, but gives the actual participants first-hand experiences and lessons on how to improve. You can study all the film you want, but there’s no substitute for facing a superior foe in real, intense competition."

There is a definite logic to this argument, particularly given the allure of Olympic glory. But will countries make the investment into women's hockey given that, for the immediate future, they're basically trying to build a Bronze Medal team? Well, they should. As Sweden proved in 2006 upsets are possible, if rare. Furthermore, while Canada and the US will continue to have much deeper pools of talent to draw upon for decades to come, the beauty of the Olympics is that you only need 23 players on your roster - it's hard to imagine that a men's US 'B' team would have fared nearly as well against a Canada 'B' squad, but none of that mattered in the Olympic format. Same with the women's game. If countries like Sweden, Finland, Russia and China (yes, China has a competitive program that has grown by leaps and bounds) can get to the point where they develop elite players that can stack a full roster, they will begin to challenge Canada and the US in tournaments.

Unfortunately, this appears to be a long way from happening. As Sarah Kwak notes about the Russian program:

"The women's team receives minimal financial support from the Russian federation and little training for the World Championships and the Olympics. In anticipation of Vancouver, Russia's women gathered for sporadic international tournaments such as the Canada Cup, and didn't begin their final Olympic training camp until January 24, three weeks before the Games. To compare, by the end of January, Team Canada was on the tail end of its six-month Midget Series during which it played teams of teenage boys. Says [Russian player] Gavrilova, "I don't think [three weeks is] good enough to get trained for the Olympics.""

Clearly women's hockey is not getting the funding (to say nothing of attention and respect) it needs to develop more than two elite national teams. However, according to Kwak, there is hope that the "Olympic carrot" will spur development in Russia:

With the Games heading to Sochi in four years, it's difficult to believe the Russians wouldn't want to field a competitive women's hockey team. Federation president Vladislav Tretiak has promised more attention and funding, ostensibly for that exact reason, and went with a young team in Vancouver to prepare these players for the next Olympics.

But, for this to be effective, much more than funding and development is necessary:

Russian sport remains highly patriarchal. The country has never tapped a woman to carry the flag at the Opening Ceremonies -- Summer or Winter -- and still prefers to see its female athletes participate in tennis, gymnastics and figure skating, rather than sports like hockey and soccer. "It's a bit of a new concept, women playing hockey," says Slava Malamud, a reporter for the Russian paper Sport-Express. "There's a popular Russian song, kind of the unofficial theme song for Russian hockey, that says, 'Only real men play hockey.' So it's still hard for people to wrap their brains around it."

Clearly a lot has to change for international women's hockey to develop to the point of competitiveness - from resources to gender attitudes to player development. So how to start the ball rolling? In my opinion, women's hockey needs a professional league (or at least semi-pro one, where athletes may hold other jobs but still receive a decent salary - think of the Canadian Football League or National Lacrosse League).

Currently, there are not a lot of options for elite female hockey players. In the US, the NCAA offers possibly the best environment in the world for competitive women's hockey outside of national competitions - at least until the athletes graduate and are left with no other place to play. In Canada, there are two amateur leagues of note: the Canadian Women's Hockey League, with six teams in Ontario and Quebec; and the Western Women's Hockey League, which has a combined four Canadian teams in Alberta and BC and one team in Minnesota.

Fortunately, with the controversy surrounding women's hockey in 2010, a push for a professional women's league has gained new momentum. It makes a lot of sense. Think how much this would help develop international players, who would get to play against stiffer competition and improve their skills with the world's best coaches. This is, realistically, the only way that non-North American players will develop into the elite players that international teams so desperately need to be competitive. Maybe each team could have a quote for international players - e.g. they have to have at least five non-North Americans on their rosters. This would prevent the teams from being flooded by Canadian and American talent.

I really hope that a pro women's league can get up and running. Partnering with the NHL, much like the WNBA does with the NBA, is probably the best way to get the league started. This is not ideal, as I think a women's league would be governed and managed more effectively if it was independent. Nonetheless, for marketing, cross-promotional and financial reasons it does make sense to partner with the NHL.

But please, if this happens, don't call the league the Women's NHL - that will only perpetuate the gender inequality that currently plagues hockey by suggesting the new league's inferiority.

Overall, I think that a semi- or fully professional hockey league is the best answer to the problem of serious competitive imbalance in women's hockey.

About damn time

I am taking a quick break from my end-of-semester insanity to write this post because of a story I just read from TSN. The Hockey Hall of Fame has amended its bylaws in a move that essentially opens the door to deserving women candidates - finally.

Until now the Hall has allowed a maximum of four inductees, of either sex, each season. Given the dominance in HHOF voting of the NHL over international leagues and competitions, the fact that there is no solid women's league, and the relative newness of the women's game (the first World Championship was held in 1994 and the first Olympics in 1998) this has meant that the odds of a female player or builer gaining entry were slim to none.

As of next year the Hall will consider a maximum of four male and two female candidates. In the last decade we have witnessed some legends in the women's game, so it is great to hear that the likes of Cammi Granato, Hayley Wickenheiser and Cassie Campbell* will likely be enshrined in the near future.

* In case you're wondering, Cassie Campbell will get in for her accomplishments on the ice rather than for her job as part of the Hockey Night in Canada broadcast crew. Although she sure did a bang-up job with Kraft Hockeyville this year, right? Right?

There are still a lot of organizational problems with women's hockey. Domestically, there is no sound North American league. And internationally, the US and Canada remain lightyears ahead of other countries in their development. But hopefully this will change in the near future - the 2010 Olympics will provide an interesting barometer to gauge the development of second-tier nations such as Sweden, Finland and - yes - China.

But despite these problems there are still some great players who have shone in the World Championship and Olympic spotlight. And this is made all the more impressive by the fact that these women are amateur athletes who must juggle their personal and professional lives with the rigours of competing in hockey at an international level.

As for the lack of competition between Canada/US and the rest, Sweden's historic upset of the United States in the 2006 Olympic semi-finals gives hope that this balance of power is slowly shifting.

So, as the women's game evolves, it is only appropriate that the Hockey Hall of Fame also shows that it can - gasp! - change with the times. The Hall has been criticized in the past for its unwillingness to adjust to new realities and to shed its NHL bias. But at least it is now showing that it is flexible, and hopefully this will soon be demonstrated by the induction of the deserving female candidates that it has thus far ignored.