At the beginning of this week the last hopes for superstars at the ice hockey world championship in Latvia were dashed.
Alexander Ovetschkin and Leon Draisaitl will not travel to Riga - although they were eliminated from the play-offs of the NHL elite league with Washington and Edmonton.
But Russia's striker had been playing for weeks and wants to recover, Germany's “Sportsman of the Year” seems to need some distance after the next disappointment in the battle for the Stanley Cup.
And the two top strikers are by no means the only ice hockey millionaires to receive the Corona World Cup.
Of the first 80 players on the NHL scorer list, exactly one is in Latvia.
Laughed in America as a B tournament
An ice hockey world championship is never a meeting of the best of the best anyway. Even without a pandemic, many refuse. In North America, the event, often ridiculed as a B tournament, is of little interest, the play-offs of the NHL are running parallel. Wayne Gretzky, the best player in history, came only once in his 21 years as a professional. Only in the past few years has there been a rethink about who's eliminated in the NHL likes to come. "Others continue to play in the play-offs at home and are getting better, I wanted to extend my season at the top level," said Jack Eichel, captain of the Buffalo Sabers, in Cologne in 2017. Previously, stars like Canada's folk hero Sidney Crosby were there, and in 2018 Connor McDavid, the biggest attraction in world ice hockey, played for Canada.
None of these will be seen this year. Europe's teams rely primarily on players from the domestic leagues, the North Americans on talent. The Canadians have twelve players who are 22 years old or younger. They were promptly without a point after three games - including defeats against Latvia and Germany. Swedes, Finns, Czechs and Russians have also lost to Danes, Belarusians, Kazakhs, Swiss and Slovaks. The ice hockey world is upside down: the little ones cheer, the big ones watch in disbelief.
That arouses unprecedented desires. "Even supposed outsiders are capable of anything this year," says German defender Marco Nowak. And definitely means your own team. In Switzerland, too, there is talk of the title, in Slovakia they are dreaming after three opening wins, and hosts Latvia are also on top with seven points.
That this is only possible because the best players in the world are missing is of secondary importance to the audience. A World Cup is a World Cup. In Germany, more than a million people tuned into “Sport 1” on Monday against Canada - five times as many as in the top game of the season in the German Ice Hockey League. After that, the social networks were full of cheering messages. That the Canadians had something between the C and D teams on the ice? No matter, Germany beats the motherland of ice hockey, the record Olympic champion and 26-time world champion. That got stuck.
The world association is also diligently participating, telling about new records and historical surprises through its channels. The IIHF sees its chance to reach new target groups in smaller ice hockey nations. This is also being welcomed in Canada. The Hockey News wrote: “As with all underdog nations celebrating incredible victories, there is hope that it will spark interest in young children in wanting to play ice hockey. It's more important than seeing the same teams win year after year. "
The IIHF is therefore in a bind. If your tournament is to be taken seriously in the long term, it needs at least some of the best players in the world. But then the nations in which ice hockey has long been a popular sport always cheer. The IIHF will probably not regulate the squad. Next year in Finland it will look different again: more stars, fewer surprises. The current tournament in Latvia, like so much in Corona times, is an exceptional situation. But maybe one in which the sport wins new fans and active players that it would otherwise not have reached.