Recent Four Nations competition, which excluded Russia, clearly got beneath the skin of hockey-loving strongman
Amid the somewhat murky details emerging from Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin’s call on Tuesday – the two leaders discussed a halt on attacking energy infrastructure, then Russia immediately bombed Ukraine’s energy infrastructure – one deal, at least, was clear: the US and Russia would resume playing ice hockey.
Although benign enough on the face of it, the idea of organised games in the US and Russia, between players of both countries, was yet another concession to Putin from Trump. Unlike the US president’s previous gifts – pre-emptively allowing Russia to keep the territory it has illegally invaded, refusing to give any security guarantees to Ukraine, and strongly hinting US sanctions would soon be lifted – this was soft power, wrapped in a pair of skate laces.
Putin loves hockey. He plays it himself. (His clearly terrified opponents let him score at will.) Russia is a global powerhouse of the sport. But the best Russian players eventually leave Russia, to go play in the National Hockey League. The money is better, and the fame greater.
So when Russia was booted from international hockey competition after it invaded Ukraine, that hurt Putin even more: the latest insult from a west that would never truly respect it.
Russian hockey has always been geopolitical. The Soviet teams of the 20th century were explicitly military proxies. The players were soldiers in the Red Army. Their coach was a colonel. They bunked in barracks for 11 months of the year. When they began playing – and beating – North American teams for the first time, the matches were clashes of ideology. The communists, raised since kids to play together in a collective system on the ice, versus the individualist American and Canadian professionals trying to score goals on their own (and when that didn’t work, trying to bash the Russians in the head). In the 1960s and 70s, the Soviet Union won five of six Olympic golds.
There were two big exceptions, both at the height of the cold war: the 1972 Summit Series, when a team of Canadian bruisers barely squeaked out a victory in eight games against the silky Red Army, and the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics when a plucky American team of minor-leaguers and misfits (of course) defeated the heavily favoured Soviets for gold on home turf in what became known as the “Miracle on Ice”. In case you missed the significance, it inspired a Hollywood film starring Kurt Russell.
To fully appreciate the geopolitical significance of these hockey proxies, look no further than the recent Four Nations competition, where Canada and the US worked out their animosity over Trump’s threats to make Canada the 51st state by kicking off their first game with three separate fistfights in nine seconds. Canada won the trophy and the nation practically imploded with emotion. The other two nations? Sweden and Finland. If you think Russia didn’t feel left out, let Putin bringing this up in the context of a summit with the US president about the biggest war in Europe since 1945 be a clue.
Just as Saudi Arabia knows the soft power of sport, getting back on their blades on the global ice rink would be a huge triumph for Putin’s Russia. Even better that it comes just as Alexander Ovechkin, the best Russian player of all time and the literal founder of a Putin fanclub, is about to eclipse Wayne Gretzky’s NHL goal record – and to do so while playing for the Washington Capitals, no less. (Gretzky is Canadian, so it is not an American loss – although he has recently attracted Canadian ire by having dinner at Mar-a-Lago and not wearing enough patriotic red.)
As for Trump, who appears to see Putin not as a foe but as an equal – great men leading great powers and carving up the world between them – the idea of a Four Nations competition was silly anyway. For him it has only ever been the Two Nations, and you can imagine he and Putin watching it together from the Kremlin press box at Moscow’s CSKA arena, not discussing Ukraine at all.
