Fire and ice: inside the fastest team sport
Ice hockey is the world's fastest team sport and is most popular in Canada, the northern United States, Scandinavia and Russia.
It is the official national winter sport of Canada, where the first recorded hockey games were played in the mid-1850s by British soldiers stationed in Kingston and Halifax.
In the early 1870s, the first known set of ice hockey rules were drawn up by students at Montreal's McGill University.
Today, only six of the 30 NHL franchises are based in Canada, but Canadian players outnumber Americans in the league.
While there are 66 members of the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF), Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Russia, Slovakia, Sweden and the United States have finished in most of the coveted first, second and third places at IIHF World Championships.
Of the 63 medals awarded in the men's competition at the Olympic level from 1920 on, only six did not go to the one of those countries.
China Daily
(China Daily 02/09/2009 page10)
