Despite the devastating Olympic loss for the Canadian women’s team, hockey is getting a glow-up in the country
Yesterday, the Canadian women’s hockey team lost the gold medal game to the U.S. team in the Winter Olympics. After a gruelling and unlikely rise to the top for Canada, this was a devastating loss for the country’s…
Yesterday, the Canadian women’s hockey team lost the gold medal game to the U.S. team in the Winter Olympics. After a gruelling and unlikely rise to the top for Canada, this was a devastating loss for the country’s hockey fans.
But unlike Winter Olympics of the past, Canadians can console themselves by turning on the Professional Women’s Hockey League or re-watching Heated Rivalry.
Today on Commotion, host Elamin Abdelmahmoud speaks with culture critics Teri Hart, Tara Slone and Rollie Pemberton about heartbreaking loss, but also the reinvigoration of hockey culture, especially for women.
We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion on the Casey Wasserman fall-out, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.
Elamin: Teri, let's just rip off this bandaid. How are you feeling after watching that?
Teri: I don't feel good. This was a game that the Canadian women went into as underdogs, as quite significant underdogs. And so I think that they gave us a run that we should feel very proud of.
I had a text with [Commotion] producer Stuart and I think that his daughter summed it up. Because Stuart texted me and said, “My daughter is — all caps — WEEPING, her first real case of sports heartbreak.” And I think that is it, right? I think that we collectively felt that heartbreak, that team, Marie-Philip Poulin. We were cheering. And there's something about women's hockey for me that is quintessentially Olympic.
Elamin: How do you think that as a cultural moment makes us feel?
Teri: I think that Canada, even in hockey, we're pretty good losers. And it's something that I think we should feel proud of. I think everybody felt like, good for them, that was a great effort, what a run, well-deserved silver. I think there was a lot of positive about that. And a lot questions about, OK, where are we going next? And I like that about us. I really do.
Elamin: I want to broaden the context a little bit, Tara, because we're also in this moment where this is the first Winter Olympics since the launch of the Professional Women's Hockey League. And even though we didn't get that result that we wanted, talk to me about the importance of this final happening now, now that we have the league, it exists. Talk to me how this changes our relationship to women's hockey going forward.
Tara: The Olympics always provide a bump, they have our attention every four years. And now, it’s amplified in the world and we have something to look forward to next week, basically. First of all, it ensures that all these women are playing best-on-best all the time throughout the season. We're not going to lose the fans that would have come and then had nowhere to watch until the world championships.
I'm going to say this also about the broadcasters: it's very clear to me that having a women's league and having the opportunity to broadcast consistently has made the Canadian broadcast team stellar — this isn't just because I'm here on CBC. I thought they were phenomenal. So I just think we're creating a culture and an ecosystem where there's professional women and we get to watch them all the time and it's a gift.
Elamin: I'm going to zoom out even wider…. I would say that over the last maybe year-and-a-half, two years or so, for lots of different reasons, the place of hockey in the Canadian imagination had been diminishing, right? It had been shifting a little bit. It's always been at the centre of our cultural imagination, but that had been shifting because of some not great news stories.
And then you cut to this women's hockey team, and then also at the same time, all the excitement around Heated Rivalry. It feels like suddenly hockey is maybe not only returning, but has a new glow about it.
Rollie, do you think we're returning to a place where we're prizing hockey in a different way?
Rollie: Yeah, I definitely feel like that. Just even watching that game, I was feeling the pride strongly. I think anecdotally with the PWHL, people I've talked to who never used to talk about hockey, they're obsessed with that league and they're really excited. They're like, “We need a team in Edmonton.” Everybody's talking about it.
You want to talk about growing the game? Watching that game yesterday, we've got a new generation that is, “We’ve got to beat America when we grow up.”
