After the Spring Festival this year, the first good news of Chinese ice hockey came from Reykjavik, Iceland-the Chinese U20 men's ice hockey team won the IIHF World Youth Championship Division B Group B Championship with a record of 5 victories.

This is the first time that the Chinese men's youth ice hockey team has won the championship in this group, and it is also the first time that the team has been promoted to Group A of the second division.

　　Affected by the epidemic, the Chinese U20 youth team failed to make an appearance in the Ice Hockey World Youth Championship for two consecutive years. Almost none of the players participating in this event has formal international competition experience.

However, in actual combat, the players showed excellent personal standards and teamwork ability, and achieved big victories against Serbia, Mexico, and Chinese Taipei; facing the main competitors Iceland and Belgium for promotion , Playing steadily, especially against the Belgian team in the first match, they fell behind three times and equalized the score three times. In the end, they won the overtime lore and played the momentum of a young Chinese ice hockey player.

　　The reporter checked the registration form of the Chinese team and found that these players were basically born in 2004 and 2005, and all of them are local players. Except for a few players who have been training ice hockey in North America all the year round, most of the rest live and study in Beijing. Is a student at school.

　　These data mean that our players won this championship under the circumstance of "playing big with small", and most of the players in the team will still have the opportunity to participate in at least one World Youth Championship.

They have the potential to play at a higher level in the second division A competition next year.

　　The Chinese coach of the Chinese team believes that more than 90% of the U20 players this time are student soldiers. They have never left the normal education and living environment since they were young, and they have integrated with the school and society. Ability and adaptability are stronger than those of professional teams. In addition, most of them have accumulated thousands of game experience, so the overall quality of the game is obviously higher than that of other professional teams.

Of course, they can enter the ice rink and become ice hockey players, which will benefit from the Beijing Winter Olympics to a greater extent.

　　After Beijing successfully bid to host the Winter Olympics in 2015, there has been an upsurge of ice and snow sports among teenagers in major cities in China.

In order to encourage more young people to participate in ice and snow sports, Beijing has continued to carry out a series of promotion and popularization activities of "Ice and Snow Entering Campus" since 2017.

By the time of the Beijing Winter Olympics, nearly 2.1 million primary and middle school students in Beijing had participated in ice and snow sports.

At the same time, a total of 200 schools were rated as featured schools for ice and snow sports, and 200 schools were rated as Olympic education model schools.

Activities such as campus popularization and citizens’ happy ice and snow season allow primary and middle school students to directly experience the charm of ice and snow sports through skating and skiing, and to understand and become familiar with ice and snow sports through dryland curling, floor hockey, and roller skating.

　　The increase in the participation rate of young people has allowed the development of competitive reserve talents to form a blowout.

As of last year, Beijing had five municipal youth ice hockey teams and one ski team, as well as 125 district-level youth winter sports teams. The number of registered youth athletes reached 7,565, nearly a hundred times that of 2017.

　　The popularity of youth ice hockey in Beijing is leading the country.

The 2021 Beijing Interschool Ice Hockey League will attract 119 schools, 126 teams, and 1,730 athletes to participate, with a total of 319 games.

From 2021 to 2022, a total of 1,224 games will be held in the Beijing Youth Ice Hockey Club League, with 25 clubs, 256 teams, and nearly 3,600 players participating. The scale of the event is the largest in Asia.

　　At present, Beijing is focusing on building a college ice hockey league. If this plan can be realized as soon as possible, ice hockey in Beijing and even the whole country will form a complete ecosystem, and will be connected to the professional league of adult teams.

In this way, China's ice hockey will enter a higher stage.

　　(Our reporter Wang Dong)

　　Guangming Daily