British media focus on ice hockey veterans on frozen ponds in northeast China

Source: Global Times

Reuters reported on January 20 that the original title: Meet the Chinese ice hockey "veterans" on a frozen pond far from the Olympic Games" The first game of the Winter Olympics... Begin! Shouts echoed among onlookers by a frozen pond, and under the non-harsh sunlight and clear blue sky, 12 men wearing helmets and other hockey equipment posed on the improvised ice hockey rink. The referee threw the hockey ball onto the gray marble-like ice and hurried to the side. A striker hit the hockey ball at his teammate, but the latter did not catch the pass, a mistake that was quickly exploited by the opposing player.

The men, mostly in their fifties and sixties, are amateur hockey players in the northeastern Chinese city of Anshan, and their passion stands in stark contrast to the general disinterest Chinese in the sport. The Chinese men's national ice hockey team will compete at the Winter Olympics next month. But for amateurs like Anshan, playing hockey isn't about breaking Olympic records or participating in elite leagues.

Many of them are friends for more than 30 years, from all walks of life, including blue-collar workers, civil servants and police officers, others are retirees, such as organizer Chu Cequn. Chu, who is in his 70s, said he stopped playing hockey three years ago but still occasionally serves as a referee, "We like to compete with senior teams of the same age from nearby cities such as Liaoyang, Shenyang and Dalian."

Chu has been organizing pond hockey games for a long time, even after local state-owned enterprises stopped supporting such games as northeast heavy industry turned from prosperity to decline. There is no professional hockey league in China, and Chu's favorite team is the Pittsburgh Penguins of the North American Professional Hockey League (NHL). However, due to fears of the epidemic, NHL players will not participate in this Winter Olympics. Even so, Chu still hopes to take his 10-year-old grandson to Beijing to watch the game.

Since Anshan doesn't have an indoor ice hockey rink open to the public, the amateurs have to take up public space — playing hockey on frozen ponds and lakes in city parks. Chu, who started playing hockey after entering college in 1980 at the age of 30, said, "We first determined the center of the ice rink, and then surrounded it with planks, a total of 80 planks..." After that, the teammates began to take turns scraping the ice every day, and also needed to pump water from the pond with an electric pump to water the surface of the course. The rest of the (freezing) work is done by the weather at minus 20°C. "We play hockey outside for 50 or 60 days a year," said Li Bingru, a 68-year-old man who is both a defender and a winger. (Written by Ryan Woo et al., translated by Ding Yue)