The circumstances take getting used to.

For a long time it was not clear whether there would even be an ice hockey world championship in 2021.

After Alexandr Lukashenko responded to protests against his re-election as president with state-directed violence, Belarus was initially deprived of the title fights.

Latvia, previously only intended as a co-organizer, stepped in as the sole organizer after some back and forth.

Marc Heinrich

Sports editor.

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    And so the German team moved into quarters in Riga, where they were cut off from the outside world and prepared for their adventure mission. The team is only allowed to leave the hotel quarantine for training and games. The corona crisis makes strict precautions and regular health tests necessary, so that a tournament in the safety bubble awaits everyone involved, the course of which is extremely difficult to predict. The start of the Germans, with brilliant victories over Italy (9: 4) and Norway (5: 1), turned out to be very promising, as if the players had heard their coach.

    More research than any national coach before Toni Söderholm formulated the goal he has in mind with the team: “Our players want to be among the best in the world and thus become world champions,” was the most pithy of his statements, with which the Finn made it clear that with one place Satisfaction is no longer inevitable among the top 8.

    Since winning a silver medal at the 2018 Olympics, Leon Draisaitl's rise to a star in North America and many talented people moving to the top addresses in the NHL, self-perception has changed noticeably.

    Corona infection near Söderholm

    Söderholm accelerated the spirit of optimism, which is borne by the belief in one's own strength, from the first day he took over the job in autumn 2018. The family man played for RB Munich in the first division until 2016. He was a veritable defender, whose strengths were already evident in the dressing room, where he was valued as a mentor for the young people at his side.

    In his debut behind the national team's ties, he and the team reached the quarter-finals at the 2019 World Cup, before the pandemic thwarted all other major events. Söderholm was unable to work with the players for almost 18 months. He calls it "the worst time of my career". Last autumn, at the Deutschland Cup in Krefeld, he had to watch from bed: A corona infection put him, who is usually bursting with energy, completely out of action: “I had 40 fevers, lay flat. Then I lost my sense of smell and taste. "

    It was only after a month and a half that everything was over. “Now I am very well again, there are no after-effects to be felt. So I was lucky. ”In order to get a feeling for coaching to get back into the game, he watched videos for hours with recordings of previous games, and he also phoned the sixty players he had listed as World Cup candidates for his team. regularly. Since he wanted to keep the risk of infection as low as possible, Söderholm decided that the team had to train in three separate groups before leaving for the Baltic States: the professionals from the individual camps only had contact via the balconies of their team accommodation in Nuremberg.

    "Toni Söderholm knows perfectly how to create a good structure", praises captain Moritz Müller, "everyone has understood that we all have to pay something in order to be successful together." Söderholm speaks German in the cabin, which is North American in this country shaped sport is an exception. He says it's a sign of connection. He made it unmistakably clear what the national team should stand for in Riga: “It's about passion, will and pride.” A sentence with the message of which he addressed himself both internally and to his opponents. With Söderholm at the top, the days of understatement in German ice hockey are over.