With the IIHF Council having cancelled the rest of the 2022 World Junior Championship, it has only itself to blame.
The 2022 World Junior Championship came to an abrupt end last night when the IIHF Council made the difficult decision to cancel the remainder of the tournament due to on-going COVID-19 – a recommendation that was brought forth by the tournament’s COVID-19 medical group. With multiple countries having players test positive for COVID since the start of the tournament, this decision is hardly unexpected. With the IIHF having looser restrictions and increased chances of contact with other teams and random patrons of the hotels that housed these teams, the only ones to blame for such a careless and unfortunate ending to the tournament is the IIHF itself.
It all started on Tuesday when Team USA was forced to forfeit its game against Switzerland due to COVID-19 protocols, gifting Team Switzerland a 1-0 win. Later that evening, Team Canada put on its best offensive performance of the tournament in just its second game played, defeating Austria 11-2. Connor Bedard led the way for the Canadians, becoming just the second 16-year-old to score a hat trick for Canada in a World Juniors since The Great One, Wayne Gretzky in 1977. Bedard had been heavily talked about since becoming only the eighth 16-year-old ever to make a Canadian world junior roster, joining names like Gretzky, Connor McDavid and Sidney Crosby – some pretty elite company. That game was the last time we would see hockey played at this year’s World Junior Championship.
According to The Athletic, Wednesday’s first two scheduled games were notched as forfeits after Team Czechia and Team Russia produced positive test results. Defending gold medalist Team USA, who forfeited Tuesday’s Group B game against Switzerland, was set to take on Sweden pending results from COVID-19 testing Wednesday morning. Tests conducted on the players Tuesday night were negative except for the two players who’d previously tested positive. It was then that the IIHF Council announced that while it continued to ensure the health and safety of the tournament’s participants, Wednesday’s forfeitures meant “the sportive integrity of the event has been compromised.”
“Together with the teams, we came into this event with full confidence in the COVID-19 protocols put in place by the IIHF, the LOC, Alberta Health, Alberta Health Services and the Public Health Agency of Canada,” IIHF President Luc Tardif said in a statement. “The ongoing spread of COVID-19 and the Omicron variant forced us to readjust our protocols almost immediately upon arrival to attempt to stay ahead of any potential spread. This included daily testing and the team quarantine requirement when positive cases were confirmed. We owed it to the participating teams to do our best to create the conditions necessary for this event to work. Unfortunately, this was not enough. We now have to take some time and focus on getting all players and team staff back home safely.”
While the IIHF will claim to have had teams in a “bubble” like last year, this “bubble” was not as strict as the varying degrees of safety taken by a variety of sports since the start of the pandemic. This included several teams staying in the same hotel, that hotel also being shared by outside patrons due to weddings and other events being held in Edmonton and Red Deer. Needless to say, the IIHF made little effort to make sure they had successfully kept its players and staff members safe.
Last year the tournament was played in Edmonton without fans and the United States upset the hosts 2-0 in the final. The teams battled through early COVID-19 issues, but were eventually able to get through it and complete the tournament. However, this year with two venues, it became difficult to keep the players in a “bubble” environment, as had been the case in Edmonton. According to the Edmonton Sun, players in Red Deer had their own floor at the tournament hotel, but the general public had access to the hotel also. And, this hotel was hosting multiple events, including a wedding.
“We worked with the hotels in both venues to ensure we had complete exclusivity on the floors we were on,” said Dean McIntosh, vice president of events and property for Hockey Canada. “We also worked with the hotel in Red Deer to move all individuals who were in the hotel, out of the hotel into primary bedrooms. We did have a couple of small events that were to take place in the hotel at the far end of the conference room that was not in direct interaction with players. We gave the teams every indication that this was moving forward and advised the teams to avoid that, so they didn’t need to go to that part of the hotel.”
The fact that the IIHF, Hockey Canada, and multiple health organizations in Alberta couldn’t organize a proper “bubble” environment for the teams and their staff to successfully play out the tournament while maintaining health and safety as an actual priority, is quite frankly embarrassing for all involved. The IIHF should be ashamed of how it handled this situation and allowed for such a disaster to occur. Everything from choosing a part of the country where, generally speaking, public health measures to combat COVID-19 are the less restrictive and compliance with those measures can be spotty, to not learning from last year’s successful tournament and playing this year entirely in a bubble again, the IIHF really dropped the puck on this entire tournament and owe the countries and their players an apology and vow that they won’t fail them again.
Some of the players in this tournament will never have anything more significant in their careers than this tournament, and for the IIHF to allow this to happen is unacceptable and an irreparable error in the lives and careers of some of these young players.
“We’ve done the very best we can and we came up against an opponent that was not on the ice, but that was bigger than all of us,” Tom Renney, CEO of Hockey Canada said. “Regretfully, we’ve had to cancel this event.” — Regretfully? Maybe. But avoidable? Absolutely.
Written by: Andrew Stuetz / Edited by: Bernie Stuetz