As a rule, you will not find hockey on the front pages of the Polish sports press. The sensational presence of the Poles at the World Championships in Prague and Ostrava, which will begin on Friday, has at least disrupted this order a little. It is also written that Poland could organize the hockey championship itself.
Sweden with Denmark, Switzerland, Germany. This is a – rather stereotypical – list of the organizers of the next world championships in ice hockey.
Kazakhstan, which is bidding alongside France to host the 2028 World Cup, can disrupt the established order. It has never hosted this event until now.
Another unlooked-for candidate may be Poland in the future, which will now present itself among the elite after 22 long years.
“I don’t think it’s a completely crazy idea,” said Luc Tardif, head of the IIHF hockey federation, who recently officially visited the Czech neighbor, in an interview with Polsat Sport.
“Poland has experience in organizing large hockey events. You could say that you are used to it. Divisional championships are proof. You have a good infrastructure at your disposal and you know how to optimally prepare the event,” he described.
But he reminded that the upcoming championships are “dismantled”.
“The most important thing is that your representation remains among the elite,” Tardif reminded the Poles.
Marta Zawadzka, vice president of Polish hockey and also a member of the IIHF Council, agrees with this. “We have the stadiums. It’s just about preparing them. And about our boys surviving among the elite,” she told TVP Sport.
“It’s true that if we want to one day host the top group of the World Cup, we have to improve on the sporting side,” she added.
The last time Poland played among the elite, at the 2002 World Cup in Sweden, they finished third from the bottom. Normally that would have been enough to keep him up, but not then because the Japanese were last, and as a special Asian qualifier, they couldn’t go down.
The Poles have come close to a comeback several times since then, but have also experienced floundering between the second and third highest levels of the World Championship.
The development of the domestic competition helped them, as former goalkeeper Ondřej Raszka, a native of Třinec with a Polish passport, described in an interview for Aktuálně.cz.
“When I started in Poland in 2010, players from the Czech second league went there and were among the best. Today they don’t get there anymore and it’s difficult even for players from the first league,” he pointed out.
“Hockey players with experience from the KHL or Northern Europe come to Poland, the teams pump money into it and can afford it. This in turn attracts young people, because the more competition there is, the more they have to try to get into the lineup,” he said .
Hockey players from the domestic league make up the majority of the Polish national team. The exceptions are forwards Pawel Zygmunt and Kamil Walega, who played in the Czech extra league this season, or another forward Krzysztof Macias from the elite Canadian junior team.
In any case, the Poles are the biggest outsider in the Ostrava group. They defeated Hungary twice in the preparation (5:2, 6:2), but then lost to Slovenia (0:2, 1:3), Great Britain (1:3, 1:2), Slovakia (1:6) and in General of Denmark (1:3).
They mainly fight with France and Kazakhstan to stay.
In terms of sports, they have a lot to catch up on. But when it comes to facilities, they could easily host the World Cup with NHL stars next year. They do not have as many winter or multifunctional stadiums as the Czech Republic, but five of them have a capacity of more than ten thousand. In addition, these are relatively new or, in the case of Katovic, renovated stands.
The largest is the Krakow hall with a capacity of more than 15,000 for hockey.
Until now, Poland has hosted the hockey elite only in 1931 and 1976, when, as an outsider, it shocked the Soviets with a win.
