Olympic Ice Hockey Medal Winners

Men's ice hockey became an Olympic sport in 1920, and Canada overshadowed the competition for several decades, winning nearly all of the tournaments until the rise of the mighty Soviet "Big Red Machine" in 1956. The Soviet Union ruled the sport for the second half of the 20th century.

The Early Years

The first Olympic men's ice hockey tournament was actually held during the 1920 Summer Olympics in Antwerp, Belgium. The Winter Olympics, which began in 1924 in Chamonix, France, included a men's ice hockey tournament, and it has been part of the Winter Games ever since.

Canada dominated the early years of Olympic ice hockey, winning the gold medal in five of the first six tournaments. But its domination was not to last. From the mid-50s through the late 1980s, the Soviet Union owned Olympic ice hockey, winning seven gold medals over the course of nine Olympic tournaments. (The U.S. won gold in 1960 and 1980 when college players defeated the USSR in the "Miracle on Ice.")

"The Soviets structured their elite league to ensure the national team’s success in international competition," John Soares noted in a 2008 article in the Brown Journal of World Affairs. The International Olympic Committee would not allow professional athletes to compete in ice hockey until 1986, and the National Hockey League did not give the green light for its players to take part in the Games until 1998.

'Amateur' Professionals

Because of sports regulations, only amateurs could compete in Olympic ice hockey for most countries. The Soviets, by contrast, developed what was essentially a professional Olympic ice hockey team, though the country, as Soares noted, did not call it that:

All Soviet athletes were classified as amateurs, and many of the best hockey players in the Soviet Union were designated as professional military officers, even though they trained full-time in their sport and received compensation that placed them among the elites in Soviet society.

Allowing the Soviets to field ice hockey teams composed of full-time athletes helped them to run roughshod over their Olympic opponents.

After the USSR broke up in 1991, some of the nations that had comprised the Soviet Union began to field their own teams. Nevertheless, the Commonwealth of Independent States, which was made up of most of the countries of the former USSR, managed to win gold in 1992.

Starting in 1998, teams from other countries, boosted by the inclusion of NHL players, began to take their turns atop the medal podium. In 2017, however, the NHL reversed its decision and prohibited its players from participating in Olympic hockey. The winning team in 2018 was made up of independent athletes from Russia, who were allowed to compete even though their country was officially banned from the Olympic Games because of a doping scandal.