For the first two periods of the gold medal game, it looked like the U.S. team hadn’t woken up yet. The Soviet squad had taken a 2-1 lead as the teams went to the locker room following the first period. But in the third stanza, the Americans, led by 1980 “Miracle on Ice” head coach Herb Brooks and a squad of NHL players, pulled away from the Czechoslovaks and won the game 9-4 to claim their first gold medal since 1968.
Hockey has been a part of the Olympics since 1920, but it wasn’t until 1956 that the men’s tournament became the top-level competition it is today. The Soviet Union won the next nine Olympic golds, overtaking Canada as the dominant international team, before disbanding in 1991 and allowing a Unified Team of former Soviet players to win the 1992 Albertville tournament.
In the 1998 Nagano Games, women’s ice hockey made its debut. It was an event that gave rise to stars such as Marie Philip Poulin, who inspired the first four straight women’s titles for Canada from 2002 to 2014. Those victories, which included the aforementioned upset of the Soviets, helped launch hockey into the mainstream and created a new rivalry between the United States and Canada. In the meantime, professional players in countries such as Russia (which competed as OAR in PyeongChang) and Sweden embraced Olympic participation. Many observers predicted that bringing in professional players would undermine the Olympic spirit, as well as lead to post-Olympic fatigue for some players.