Ice hockey

This article is about the contact team sport played on ice. For the overall family of sports involving sticks and goals, see Hockey. For the sport played on fields and using a hockeyball, see Field hockey.
For other uses, see Ice hockey (disambiguation).

Ice hockey
An ice hockey forward (Bryan Rust of the Pittsburgh Penguins) shoots toward a net defended by a goaltender (Braden Holtby of the Washington Capitals).
Highest governing bodyInternational Ice Hockey Federation
First played1875; 149 years ago (1875), Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Characteristics
Contact
Team members
  • 3 forwards
  • 2 defencemen
  • 1 goaltender
Mixed-sexNo
Type
Equipment
Venue
Presence
Olympic
ParalympicYes
Pictogram used to identify ice hockey at the Winter Olympic Games

Ice hockey (or simply hockey in North America) is a team sport played on ice skates, usually on an ice skating rink with lines and markings specific to the sport. It belongs to a family of sports called hockey. Two opposing teams use ice hockey sticks to control, advance, and shoot a vulcanized rubber hockey puck into the other team's net. Each goal is worth one point. The team with the highest score after an hour is declared the winner; ties are broken in overtime. In a formal game, each team has six skaters on the ice at a time, barring any penalties, including a goaltender. It is a full contact game and one of the more physically demanding team sports.[1][2]

The modern sport of ice hockey was developed in Canada, most notably in Montreal, where the first indoor game was played on March 3, 1875. Some characteristics of that game, such as the length of the ice rink and the use of a puck, have been retained to this day. Amateur ice hockey leagues began in the 1880s, and professional ice hockey originated around 1900. The Stanley Cup, emblematic of ice hockey club supremacy, was initially commissioned in 1892 as the "Dominion Hockey Challenge Cup" and was first awarded in 1893 to recognise the Canadian amateur champion and later became the championship trophy of the National Hockey League (NHL). In the early 1900s, the Canadian rules were adopted by the Ligue Internationale de Hockey sur Glace, in Paris, France, the precursor to the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF). The sport was played for the first time at the Olympics during the 1920 Summer Games—today it is a mainstay at the Winter Olympics. In 1994 ice hockey was officially recognized as Canada's national winter sport.[3]

While women also played during the game's early formative years, it was not until organizers began to officially remove body checking from female ice hockey beginning in the mid-1980s that it began to gain greater popularity, which by then had spread to Europe and a variety of other countries. The first IIHF Women's World Championship was held in 1990, and women's play was introduced into the Olympics in 1998.

  1. ^ Cox, M. H.; Miles, D. S.; Verde, T. J.; Rhodes, E. C. (1995). "Applied Physiology of Ice Hockey" (PDF). Sports Med. 19 (3): 184–201. doi:10.2165/00007256-199519030-00004. ISSN 0112-1642. PMID 7784758. S2CID 26998630. Archived (PDF) from the original on January 9, 2023. Retrieved January 9, 2023.
  2. ^ Dillman, Charles J.; Stockholm, Alan J.; Greer, Nancy (1984). "Movement of ice hockey players". Isbs – Conference Proceedings Archive. ISBS.
  3. ^ "National Sports of Canada Act, S.C. 1994, c. 16". Government of Canada, Justice Laws. December 31, 2002. Archived from the original on November 6, 2021.