Women's World Championship canceled, IIHF pledges to seek new dates
Nova Scotia government steps in to shut down tournament for safety reasons
In yet another devastating blow in a year with so many to sports, the 2021 IIHF Women’s World Championship set to start May 6 in Halifax and Truro, Nova Scotia, has been canceled. The decision was announced Wednesday by Hockey Canada and the IIHF, blindsiding participants who were preparing for the tournament in training camps around the world.
The decision was handed down from the provincial government of Nova Scotia, which informed Hockey Canada this morning that it would have to cancel the tournament citing safety concerns. From the IIHF and Hockey Canada’s joint Statement:
“This is very disappointing news to receive with just a few weeks until the tournament was to begin,” said IIHF President René Fasel. “We strongly believe that we had the adequate safety measures in place to protect players, officials, spectators, and all residents in Halifax and Truro, based on the IIHF and Hockey Canada’s experiences from hosting the IIHF World Junior Championship in Edmonton.
“In the end, we must accept the decision of the government. This does not mean that we will not have a Women’s World Championship in 2021. We owe it to every single player that was looking forward to getting back on the ice after such a difficult year that we do everything possible to ensure this tournament can be moved to new dates and played this year.”
Fasel told John Wawrow of the AP that the IIHF will hold a meeting Thursday to begin discussions about how to proceed. They want to have this tournament and it may be moved to another date in the summer and may have to be moved to a different country.
"A tremendous amount of work has gone in to hosting a safe and successful world championship, and despite not being able to host the event in Nova Scotia, Hockey Canada remains committed to hosting the Women’s World Championship this year. We will explore all options to host the event in the coming months, if it is deemed safe to do so,” Hockey Canada president Tom Renney said in a statement.
This is now the second consecutive Women’s Worlds that has been lost to COVID and this is the last one scheduled until 2023 as we are about to enter an Olympic cycle. That’s what made the 2021 Women’s Worlds so critical as it is a major event for preparation for the 2022 Olympic Winter Games. It is imperative to find a place for this tournament.
The U.S. Women’s National Team had been training in Portland, Maine, in preparation for the tournament. They were expected to quarantine for eight full days in their hotel before they could even practice after arriving in Nova Scotia.
Part of that is believed to be why head coach Bob Corkum abruptly stepped down, citing to the Associated Press his discomfort with the protocols. Joel Johnson was inserted as the interim head coach and had expressed optimism yesterday about the players taking every day one step at a time and simply enjoying every day they get to be on the ice together in a video released by USA Hockey documenting the team’s preparations. The coach noted that they continued to hope everyone would get through camp healthy and that they’d have a tournament to play in, alluding to at least some uneasiness about what the future held. Still, there was very little indication this announcement was coming today.
Now that the decision has been made, the teams will have to go back to square one in terms of where they go next. They don’t know when or if there is a tournament to play for and players have been preparing with this tournament’s status in limbo, unsure of when they have to really get down to ramping up their training to make sure they’re at their peak for the tournament.
There is a lot of hand wringing, and rightfully so. The IIHF is less than a week away from hosting the U18 Men’s World Championship in Texas, had the World Juniors in Edmonton in the winter and is due to have its Men’s World Championship in Latvia in late May. To have the signature men’s events, but none of the women’s would have been brutal on all fronts. The Women’s World Championship is the pinnacle of the sport in non-Olympic years and the ultimate proving ground for the top women’s players in the game.
The fact is, the decision to keep the tournament in Nova Scotia was ultimately what thwarted the tournament, not that they could have foreseen this at the time they finalized the decision to maintain the host as was originally planned for 2020. I’ve been chatting off and on with people from USA Hockey to check in on preparations and there were going to be so many hoops to jump through to get to the tournament. Those that remained on staff and all of the players were willing to jump through those hoops to make this happen and have a chance to play. No one wanted to see this result.
The unfortunate element is that now they have to start over. There is no easy solution to moving a tournament that gathers literally hundreds of people when it comes to players, staff, tournament workers, volunteers and any essential personnel to pull off an event of this size. Also, dealing with travel restrictions, getting travel waivers, visas and a whole bunch more paperwork is one of the most challenging aspects that no one really thinks about when it comes to staging these tournaments. Now throw in a global pandemic when paperwork has been backed up, health guidelines are ever changing and the requirements for travel can flip quickly. That’s also what makes having a suitable backup plan more difficult to execute.
In a normal year, it’s months of preparation — sometimes years — to stage a tournament. Even in a simplified COVID format, there’s so much advance work and infrastructure that a tournament like this needs to be played. Hundreds of hotel rooms, catering, medical personnel and that’s before detailing the many, many health concerns of local governments and health officials. Also throw in the fact that in order to host an event like this, you need an intricate and comprehensive set-up for health and safety protocols such as in-house COVID testing and lab analysis. If you have the runway to make those plans, then it can be done and it seemed like everything was done for Halifax, until it wasn’t good enough anymore.
I wish it could just be picked up and we can have the U18 Men’s World Championship roll right into the Women’s Worlds, but it’s not quite that simple, especially since teams from Europe have been doing the necessary paperwork to enter Canada, not the U.S.
Players are rightly publicly expressing their frustration.
The question that has to be posed to Nova Scotia’s provincial government is why wasn’t the agreed upon protocol not good enough anymore? I think there are some valid reasons that there wasn’t a Plan B just when it comes to infrastructure, but there’s less clarity on why what all the teams have been doing so far wasn’t good enough.
This decision of what happens in Nova Scotia is exactly what USA Hockey was looking to avoid with the World Men’s Under-18s. That event was supposed to be staged in Plymouth, Mich., but given the precarious nature of fluctuating COVID numbers and the continual threat of government-mandated shutdown in the state of Michigan, USA Hockey ultimately made the decision to move the tournament to Frisco and Plano, Texas. They announced that decision in early February, with a few months of runway to get everything in place.
Though Texas has less restrictive health protocols than many places, the tournament is due to be played in as close to a bubble format as they possibly can keep it. The teams are kind of in their own cohort, they’re basically in the rink and the hotel, and there’s essentially no contact with people from outside of that cohort. However, this is an event where limited tickets will be sold, so there’s always the precariousness of introducing more and more people into the building and what, if any risks, that can pose to the integrity of the tournament.
Officials for the U18 tournament have gone through a few rounds of COVID testing already as the teams have just arrived. Everyone is still holding their breath that they’re able to make the tournament work and that teams get through it healthy. Anything can happen before and during the tournament.
I don’t like giving the IIHF the benefit of the doubt often, but I do think the situation with Women’s Worlds tied their hands. It would have been very difficult for them to foresee the surge in Canada, tightening health guidelines and poor trends at this stage of the pandemic. Additionally, the Canadian Maritimes have had some of the most restrictive health protocols in place for the duration and have had largely good control of the COVID situation in comparison to many other places. The numbers in Nova Scotia are pretty low right now, by comparison to other provinces.
Ultimately, however, the situation across the entire country has changed and the governments are trying to be proactive for the benefit of health and safety. I still think they could have found a way to make this tournament work in the bubble they were supposed to be in, especially with all of the quarantines teams would have gone through, but in the end, that’s the governments call.
UPDATE: Hockey Canada was under the impression, as early as Wednesday morning that the tournament was still a go and that there had been no indication they would need to move it either in terms of dates or location.
My sincere hope is that this gets resolved as quickly as humanly possible. Women’s hockey has been hit hard by the pandemic in so many different ways and the top women’s players have been in limbo all season. This event was hopefully going to bring the one bit of normalcy, while also serving as an incredible evaluation tool for the Winter Olympic roster building process.
The IIHF has a really difficult job on their hands, but it’s imperative they act quickly and get this tournament back on the ice, wherever and whenever they can.
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