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When Matthew Tkachuk (left) and Brandon Hagel (right) dropped their gloves in the opening seconds of play at last year’s 4 Nations Face-Off tournament, the game took on a deeper, more personal meaning for Canadians.Minas Panagiotakis/Getty Images
When Mark Carney spoke in Davos last month about the need for Canada and other nations to stand up for themselves, at a time when U.S. President Donald Trump has been waging a global tariff war and making 51st-state threats, the Prime Minister said it was time for Canada to assert its sovereignty.
He then went off script, adding an impromptu line that wasn’t part of his planned speech. In calling for Canada to defend its North, Carney said the country needs more “boots on the ice.”
At the Milan Cortina Winter Games, where sports and politics are about to collide against a backdrop of Canada-U.S. vitriol, hockey is set to emerge as the front line of a new proxy war.
Welcome to boots on the ice, Olympic-style.
Gone are the days when Canadian Prime Ministers and U.S. Presidents made friendly wagers on Olympic hockey – as Stephen Harper and Barack Obama did in 2010 and 2014, resulting in several cases of American beer being shipped to Ottawa.
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Relations are far frostier these days, and even the players know this tournament just feels different than any other Olympics in recent memory.
When Canada played the U.S. at the 4 Nations Face-Off last February, during the height of Trump’s 51st state musings, the games were steeped in political overtones far beyond anything the two countries had experienced before.
“We didn’t come to the game thinking about politics. It just kind of panned out that the tournament happened at that time,” said Brandon Hagel of the Tampa Bay Lightning, who played for Canada at that tournament and will do so again in Milan.
“Of course we knew what was going on in the world at the time, it was all over social media, so you’d be lying if you said you didn’t.”
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Seth Jarvis (24) is a late addition to Team Canada, filling in for an injured Brayden Point. The two played for Canada in last year’s 4 Nations tournament.Graham Hughes/The Canadian Press
In a moment that will go down in Canadian hockey lore, the two teams fought three times in the opening nine seconds of their first meeting. Hagel, who doesn’t consider himself a fighter, was in the middle of it all, readily accepting a challenge from American Matthew Tkachuk two seconds after the puck was dropped.
The fight has enshrined him as a national hero of sorts. When Hagel went home to Edmonton this summer, it was all people wanted to talk about.
“I told Hags, if you pay for a drink in Canada in the next 10 years, I’ll be really disappointed,” said Team Canada coach Jon Cooper, also Hagel’s coach in Tampa.
The tension, and the impact current affairs had on those games, was also not lost on the coach.
“You can’t ever understate what politics did to that tournament,” Cooper said.
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“My news conference against Sweden was all hockey. My pressers by the final [versus the U.S.] were, like, three-quarters politics.”
The Olympics has stricter rules against fighting. Still, world events have a way of finding their way into international hockey.
A showdown between Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union at the 1969 world championships, just months after Soviet tanks rolled into Prague, is considered some of the dirtiest and most heated hockey ever played. The Czechs won.
Then there was 1972 and Canada’s clash with the Soviets. And the American ‘Miracle on Ice’ in 1980. Those were as much about ideology as they were about goals and assists.
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Jon Cooper, who coached Canada at the 4 Nations Face-Off and will lead the team in Milan, said he could feel the political tension ramp up in last year’s tournament as it progressed.Minas Panagiotakis/Getty Images
Today, Trump is the flashpoint. And not just for Canada.
At the 2018 Winter Games in Pyeongchang, the Russian team (which wasn’t allowed to play as Team Russia after the country was penalized for doping infractions in 2014) came to Korea wanting to show up the U.S.
At the time, Trump and Russia were sparring over sanctions and the expulsion of diplomats from Washington, among other things – and the game between the two countries was unusually physical for Olympic hockey, with multiple scrums and penalties. In the stands, former Soviet legend and retired NHL star Igor Larionov, who was there doing colour commentary for Russian TV, felt nostalgic. He knew exactly what he was seeing.
“What’s happening in the world right now – two countries trying to push each other with disagreements and politics – I’ve been around, I lived on this stage myself in ‘84 and ‘88 … that’s war,” Larionov told me at the time.
“We’re talking about sports. But next to sports goes politics,” he said. “You’re going to war. That’s how it works.”
Russia won 4-0. Some called it hockey; Larionov called it “foreign affairs.”
“I’m sure they got a phone call from upper management to play hard,” he quipped, noting that the Kremlin had probably tuned in to watch that night.
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At last year’s 4 Nations Face-Off, where Canada lost 3-1 to the Americans in the seeding round in Montreal, then defeated the U.S. 3-2 in overtime to win the tournament in Boston, the Canadian players could sense the moment.
“We were definitely playing for Canada. I mean, Canada is so proud of their hockey and it’s something that we take very seriously,” Tampa forward Brayden Point said in an interview this fall.
“So to get the win, I think that was bigger than just our team winning. It was a win for Canada.”
Point is injured and won’t get the chance to play in Milan. On Thursday, Team Canada announced he would be replaced by Seth Jarvis of the Carolina Hurricanes, who was also on the 4 Nations roster.
American Auston Mathews is less eager to talk politics. The Toronto Maple Leafs captain, who is expected to lead the U.S. in Milan, said a few weeks ago he wasn’t concerned about such things.
“I don’t really pay attention to that stuff much. I think you’re kind of aware of it, and there’s only so much that you can control,” Matthews said. “When we go to the Olympics my focus will be on Team USA.”
As head coach of Canada, Cooper is curious whether the games in Milan will reach the level of raucousness that the 4 Nations games did, given that they were played in Montreal and Boston, with an arena full of Canadian and American fans.
“Whether that’s going to be recreated in Italy, when you’re multiple time zones away in a different continent, it’s hard to sit here and say. But it’s the Olympics. It is the granddaddy of them all,” Cooper said in an interview.
“But it’s going be hard to replicate the fact that all the fans in the building are all Canadian and American. In Italy, all countries will be in the building. It’s just going to be a different vibe.”
NHL players are returning to the Olympics for the first time in 12 years. Before the 4 Nations tournament, many of them had never had the chance to play best-on-best international hockey. Cooper has seen the impact that can have.
“I think those kids put the jersey on for the first time, it meant something way beyond hockey,” Cooper said.
