Hockey VS хоккей: The Dark Side of Soviet Hockey
“And I’ll never forget those chants ‘USA, USA’ was born right there during our game,” Viacheslav “Slava” Fetisov, the Russian hockey legend, was telling his interviewer. In the thirty-fifth anniversary of the “Miracle on Ice” game, in which the American Olympic hockey team beat the undefeated Soviets, interviews have been conducted with players of the former Soviet team, asking how they were so successful, and what made them into a legendary team whose skill has never been seen before and will never be seen again.
What made the Soviets into the team they were? Was it some sort of magic? Or was it passionate players allowed their creativity and love for the game to take over the team’s structure? Many people wonder about these things. But the truth is darker. After being told to see the movie Whiplash (which is about a student in a jazz band who messes up the rhythm and gets a chair thrown at his head and messes it up again and has to repeat it over and over again for hours) because people thought he would relate to it, Igor Larionov just shook his head and laughed when people asked him is that was what life was like as a hockey player in the Soviet Union. “No, not at all,” he said. “In the movie, the student eventually gets to go back to his nice apartment. We did not have it so lucky. They sent us right back to the barracks.” From seeing old videos of Slava Fetisov and his teammates practicing, dragging tires behind them and skating as fast as they can, my first instinct would be to assume they are at army boot camp. It didn’t look like fun, it didn’t look like the game we all know and love here in America, and it certainly didn’t look like hockey practice.
The way we Americans see the Miracle on Ice, the way we cherish it, no, that is not the way they see it. Maybe now, some of the players can talk about it with a straight face, but at the time, they did their best to erase the game from memory. Slava Fetisov reflects, “We lost to the American team, in America. Anybody could have lost not only their job, but head also. But I trained four times a day. Not because we wanted to beat Americans. We wanted to be champions.” But being champions doesn’t mean you go through horrendous rigor. Had that been done in the NHL, surely there would have been an investigation done by the NHLPA on player abuse. So badly the Soviets wanted to beat the Americans, they were ready and prepared even to go through suffering to get there. Did they get there? No.
“After the Miracle on Ice, though we did not call it that in the Soviet Union, I was recruited to play for CKSA Moscow, which doubled as the Soviet “Red Army” national team. There was no choice to be made. You could not hide from the Red Army,” says Igor Larionov. Bluntly put, he means that maybe he didn’t necessarily want to play for CKSA, but there was no choice. And once he became a part of the team, there was no going back.
The training was rigorous. Even after the miracle on ice, the players would practice skating on the ice for four hours, then run and lift weights for another six hours. After that, they were allowed to go back to the barracks and watch film for two hours before eating dinner and going to bed. It was like that, over and over, seven days a week, 365 days a year. When asked about off days, Igor Larionov was incredulous. “Off days? That’s funny. No off days. We skated every single day… we were given six ‘nights off’ the entire year. That meant if the game ended at 9:30 P.M., you could leave the facility and go see your family, until practice the next morning.” The players were constantly fighting the coach, Viktor Tikhonov, to let them live at home. But he always refused, “This is the style of my team. And this is the style of Soviet sport in the Soviet Union.” No sympathy at all.
But not to digress, what was it that made the Soviets the most powerful team in the world? “It might seem impossible that the creative style of hockey we were known for was born out of this military system. But you have to understand what happened to us when we laced our skates and stepped out on the ice – it was like breathing fresh air. We found a way to express ourselves. It could be 5 A.M. It could be 11 P.M. When we were on the ice, nothing mattered. We were in our own world. This atmosphere led to so much creativity. To call it ‘fun’ is much too simple. It was freedom.”
Not just that, but the Soviets could virtually smell their linemates. They didn’t have to look, they just felt them there. They had a system intertwined on teamwork; that is what made them so successful. They learned to rely on each other.
But their strategies failed to work in the Miracle on Ice. When asked about what the miracle on Ice taught him, Slava Fetisov replied, “I learned to never underestimate you opponent.” And after a minute of thought, he added, “And also to rely on yourself.”
Sources:
"Slava Fetisov and the Soviet Hockey Legacy." YouTube. YouTube, 22 Jan. 2015. Web. 24 Feb. 2015.
Larionov, Igor. "The Beautiful Game." The Players Tribune. The Players Tribune, 23 Feb. 2015. Web. 24 Feb. 2015.