VanAussie Daily

Paralympics – Sledge Hockey

Author: Jared

We got to go see a Paralympic event today – Sledge Hockey!

This is basically the equivalent to ice hockey, but where the people playing are seated on metal framed sleds with two inline ice skates underneath. They get around by using two small hockey sticks which have some sort of grippy surface at one end (tungston?) at one end, and hockey stick ends on the other. Basically they have to ski as hard as they can to get around, then switch to he hockey stick when they actually want to hit the puck. Here’s a pic of one:

It’s a pretty amazing sport, which involves some fairly brutal hits, but also some ponderous moves, as they can’t get around on the ice very quickly, and if they lose the puck out the back end when moving it down the ice, it takes them a while to turn around and get it again.

The time these guys spend on the ice is amazing too – I think it might be longer than regular NHL, but one guy did 41 minutes out of 60 in 7 shifts. That’s a lot of high energy time on the ice!

We saw Norway vs Sweden, and it was a great game. Really close, with the score even at the end of regular time, then even again at the end of 5 minutes of sudden death. It went to shootout (best of three, one on one), and that was even right through till the last attempts on goal – here’s a swedish guy celebrating a goal:

Norway won the day though, with the Norwegian goalie keeping the last shot out (being a goalie in sledge hockey would be a really freakin’ tough job, as they are nowhere near as manouverable as regular goalies, yet have the same size net). This led to  game of “stacks on” of course, although I felt bad for the Swedish team – Norway is one of the top teams in the world, and Sweden fought their way through the qualifiers to get here.

Here’s a quick pano of Thunderbird Stadium too, where the match was held (click it!):

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 13th, 2010 at 11:29 pm and is filed under Sport, Winter Olympics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.