The Human Condition: Remove hockey

By Daniel Schnee on February 9, 2022.

On Monday night, Team Canada and Team USA played a fantastic game of Olympic women’s hockey. A battle between the world’s top two teams, our binational rivalry has been the stuff of dreams for decades.

But Toronto Star writer Rosie DiManno doesn’t see things that way, stating in a recent column that women’s hockey “doesn’t belong” in the Olympics. She claims that Canada and the USA defeat other teams by such large margins it is essentially a two-country show, and thus women’s hockey in total should be completely removed from the Winter Games.

Believing this ridiculous idea that all women should be kept from playing Olympic hockey also assumes a number of secondary and tertiary positions: that teams from other countries are somehow “hurt” by our excellence, other teams are permanently incapable of rising to elite levels, that Olympics skill must be rendered “fair” in all ways, and so on. It also suggests that all Canadians cheer for Team Canada alone, like our multicultural society is monolithic in our sporting preferences. Japan’s recent game against China was a staring contest between their goalies, a question of who was going to blink first. Absolutely fantastic stuff, but you wouldn’t know from DiManno’s dire description of the state of international play. Canada is so dominant no one else is apparently capable of anything.

I am also curious as to why women must be left out of the Olympics while any number of men’s sports are similarly dominant. If you had kept Hayley Wickenheiser out of the Olympics for the quality of her play you would have had to have kept Wayne Gretzky out as well. If we remove women’s hockey just because Canada is dominant, then we must remove all judo because of Japan, or all distance running because of Ethiopia. People in Norway are cross-country skiers practically down to their DNA. We would almost literally have to remove Norwegians from the Winter Olympics… for being too Norwegian.

DiManno also assumes games featuring Canada or the USA are essentially bad for their opponents. I am not sure what DiManno herself has learned from sports, but playing a team as superior as we are is a golden opportunity to vastly improve your game. The lessons learned provide the skills to go out and win other games, so Canada provides a valuable service in that regard.

Also, if we ban Canadian women from Olympic hockey, what message are we sending to little boys and girls? That Albertan girls can’t have Olympic dreams, only Alberta’s boys can. That women all over the world shouldn’t get an Olympic quest because of some Canadian columnist’s opinions. And all women should be removed from Olympic hockey because a few women are highly successful. What kind of person would say such things to men? Who would say them to women, either?

I don’t want to be impolite. These days politeness seems to be at a minimum. But I can’t help thinking that if writing was an Olympic sport, DiManno’s column would not score big points in the logic department. I’m certainly not perfect. But even I know that the female hockey players of the world have earned and deserve every single moment of their Olympic dream, no matter what the score is.

Dr. Daniel Schnee is a cultural anthropologist and jazz drummer

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