‘Canada’s game’

Predictably, Canada and the United States have been eliminated from the 2022 Olympics, lasting only to the quarter-finals. Congratulations to Sweden and Slovakia and all the athletes.

The players, coaches and selection process are not to be blamed. The main reason is that the so-called National Hockey League, a US based private sports cartel, boycotts what it cannot control, profit from or own. For the second successive Olympics, the NHL refused to allow players under its contracts to participate in their national teams, this time under the pretext of the prevalence of the Covid pandemic. As a result many countries were denied their bast players – just as the MLB cartel had done with professional baseball players when it boycotted the Summer Olympics until baseball was expelled by the International Olympic Committee in 2005. Nevertheless, the NHL-obsessed sports media ridiculed China for fielding a team of dual national players and even demanded it be removed from the competition.

The countries which are now advancing in the competition have their own national leagues. Annexed Canada does not have a national league in hockey or baseball, a second-tier league in soccer, the Canadian Premier League whose goals include developing and marketing its players for transfer fees to the European leagues, and the fledging Canadian Elite Basketball League whose players split their year competing for other teams.

For their part, the governments do not invest in training and developing Canadian youth, expanding facilities, restricting monopoly right and guaranteeing people’s participation in sport as a right.

Commissioner Bettman has declared that its Canadian-based franchises should finish the year playing in the US. Further, he announced plans for a second edition of the NHL’s own farcical “World Cup” which it will own and control – just as the MLB cartel had done with its “World Baseball Classic” – part of the neo-liberal “rules-based world order” in international sport.

Image by Henry Ripplinger