OlymPicks: Asia's Hockey Saga Goes Overtime While Sneaker Freaks Lace Up Olympic Kicks
OlymPicks is an ongoing blog series whereby we highlight news, gossip, and developments regarding the buildup to Beijing's 2022 Winter Olympics.
Though China's winter sports fans are no doubt looking to the Beijing 2022 Olympics as an era-defining event, National Hockey League (NHL) commissioner Gary Bettman sees it as merely a minor play in a much longer game.
When asked about the tumultuous talks between his league and the International Olympic Committee – which devolved to the point that Bettman opted out of participating in the Pyeongchang 2018 Winter Games, leaving the fate of hockey at Beijing in 2022 uncertain – the commissioner nonchalantly played up his broader plans for the NHL in China and other nations.
Core to that plan is a pair of NHL exhibition games between the Vancouver Canucks and the LA Kings in both Beijing and Shanghai this fall. Surprisingly enough, Bettman said he didn't even face pressure from Beijing to get his stick back on the ice, as it were, in time for the NHL to partake in the 2022 Games. In fact, Business Insider reports, "Bettman said the topic of NHL players tagging along never came up," before quoting him as saying, "I think the focus is more about long-term developing the sport, not what happens for two weeks in 2022." His beef with the Olympic Committee is due, in part, to the IOC's reluctance to chip in for insurance costs.
Bettman made those blunt comments at his annual state-of-the-league address in Pittsburgh on May 29 before that city's team, the Penguins, took on the Nashville Predators (who for some reasons still haven't come up with at least a slightly less awful team name) for game one of the Stanley Cup Final. Bettman went on to firmly reiterate that negotiations between Pyeongchang's Olympic organizing committee were not happening, despite their recent comments to the contrary, effectively shutting down hope of the NHL lacing up their skates in Korea in next year.
The NHL commissioner's body check to Olympic hockey, via this game plan to host the exhibition and other NHL events in China solely through the league, should at least be some solace to winter sports enthusiasts in Beijing, who surely wish that both those exhibitions and an agreement with the IOC could take place.
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Thankfully, Olympic enthusiasts didn't solely see contentious headlines in recent weeks – the oddball distraction being the news of one architect designing a basketball shoe akin to the criss-crossed exterior of Beijing's Birds Nest Stadium. According to Mental Floss designer Nathan Kiatkulpiboone used 3D printing and "polyurethane webbing fused to a lycra base" to make the runner look like the famed Beijing landmark, which could very well leave Beijing's hockey fans longing for skates a similarly intricate pattern as consolation for no NHL players making their way to Beijing for the Winter Games of 2022.
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Such concerns may seem all the more trivial, however, if the Olympics themselves one day no longer take place. That calamitous notion was raised in a new article by USA Today which detailed a Brazilian federal prosecutor's heated criticism of the Rio 2016 Games. It said "the IOC runs the risk of endangering the future of the Olympic movement" because of ever-bloating costs and waste. That article went on to claim the day will soon come, perhaps within the next 10 years, that only prior hosts with the needed infrastructure will be hosting the games, either that or "countries run by despots for whom money is no object."
In that case, Bettman's plan to bypass the IOC looks less like spite and more like the mindset of championship captain who knows how to pace himself in face of his panting opponent.
More stories by this author here.
Email: kylemullin@truerun.com
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Photo: Reuters, Mental Floss
