HOCKEY
During the Cold War, Hockey was the most popular sport in the Soviet Union because the Soviet Hockey team represented the peak of what the Soviet Union had achieved and was proof that the Soviet system was the best. Therefore, the ice hockey rink was a venue best suited to act as a crucible for the competing ideologies of capitalism and communism. Individualism of the West was pitted against Soviet collectivism, and finally, the scoreboard would reveal the winner to the world.
According to the Soviet Union, sports were, in a way, some warfare. To them, this game was not just a game but was part of what would be referred to as propaganda. Both ideologies had the slogan that they were the best due to their system and that nothing would shake them. Moreover, the Soviet Union believed that real men played hockey, whereas cowards never played hockey.
Hockey, as a proxy and even replacement for actual conflict, in this sense, becomes the coldest of cold wars. The image of the sport as warfare would hopefully give way to the reality of the game as a catalyst for peace. “I believe hockey could accomplish much in the way of aiding young people of various countries to know each other better so that they could live in peace and harmony, work and study and, of course, take an interest in sports,” writes Tarasov.
After the replacement of Tarasov by Viktor Tikhonov as the Soviet Union coach, things were no longer easy for them as they began to lose in their games due to the many indifferences with the coach. Actually, for two decades, there had been no team from the West that had been able to defeat them, but they received the defeat in the Olympic games. The coach in the Soviet Union and the players there not in good terms at all due to the measures that the new coach had imposed for the team. At one point, the coach decided that the team should stay and train for eleven months without going to either visit their parents or even their friends.
Contrasting America and the USSR, Mogilny said, “Here people live for themselves. There I lived like a homeless dog.” Such high profile defections were a significant threat to the Soviet regime. “Politically, every time something like that happened, it was used in the media, so it was a victory for the West and a loss for the Soviet Union,” says Pozner.
Due to the many misunderstandings in the Soviet team, many of the players opted to move and join the National Hockey League in the West. However, the Russian coach and the defense minister were not ready to allow their players to join the team in the West. This lead to many of their players opting to resign rather than to survive in the harsh conditions. This was mainly attributed to the fact that the Soviet Union was running bankrupt and could not be able to fund its players as expected.
After a talk with the defense minister, the players were granted a free will to join the National Hockey League in the West, and this led to the supremacy of the West since they had a lot of funds. Hockey in the Soviet Union as a result of this began becoming unpopular since many of the well-known players had joined the National Hockey League in the West.
From a view of the outcome of events in regards to the ice hockey during the cold war, it is seen that the ice hockey was much used as a weapon in the cold war due to its popularism in the time. It was a useful diplomatic tool that opened up new channels of communication, cooperation, and common ground between global rivals. Still, it was also an alternative venue for expressing bitter antagonism and hatred, on skates, and with sticks instead of using guns.