Finland Beats ROC 2-1 to Win Gold in Men's Hockey & More News Here

More than a month in the past, when Olympic rosters had been nonetheless coming into view, Sweden’s coach supplied a plain-spoken evaluation of a subject whose fluidity and thriller had been flummoxing males’s hockey executives all over the world.

“Russia and Finland,” Johan Garpenlov mentioned, “are strong.”

They performed for the gold medal on Sunday, when Finland beat Russia, 2-1, in the final scheduled competitors of the Beijing Games.

The Finns didn’t hesitate to deliver an aggressive assault to the ice at National Indoor Stadium, the place they greater than doubled the Russians in photographs in the primary interval.

The Russians nonetheless managed a lead popping out of the primary. But even because the Finnish tempo lagged in the second, a objective evened the rating, and the match entered its final regulation interval with the sport locked in a tie.

A Finnish objective in the third interval, although, proved to be decisive and left the finale with out a few of the shootout dramatics that had dotted elimination video games in Beijing.

Sunday’s contest capped an Olympic match stripped, for the second straight Games, of present N.H.L. gamers, which left many rosters largely full of gamers from schools, European circuits and different much less seen leagues.

There had been surprises alongside the best way. The United States, which despatched its youngest staff to a Games since 1994, stormed by means of the preliminary spherical and compiled an ideal file earlier than it misplaced to Slovakia in a quarterfinal recreation that ended with a shootout. Slovakia went on to win the bronze medal, its best Olympic displaying in males’s hockey, when it embarrassed Sweden, which practically reached the gold medal recreation.

The match was much more suspenseful than the ladies’s competitors, the place Canada and the United States dominated, as regular and as anticipated. The Canadians gained the gold once they beat the Americans on Thursday. Finland’s ladies’s staff took the bronze.

But in the lads’s competitors, the Russian squad — formally competing because the Russian Olympic Committee as a penalty for the nation’s historical past of doping — was a pretournament favourite, if an imperfect one.

The Russians practically misplaced their first recreation in Beijing, a gathering with the Swiss. They later beat Denmark, which was making its inaugural Olympic look in males’s hockey, by two objectives. The Czech Republic’s staff outlasted the Russians, 6-5, to end the preliminary spherical.

They nonetheless earned a spot in the quarterfinal spherical, the place they beat Denmark once more, after which survived a semifinal towards Sweden on Friday evening, when it took a 17-shot shootout to resolve a winner.

The Finns had a considerably smoother route to Sunday’s assembly: They pummeled Slovakia in the preliminary spherical, the place additionally they beat Latvia and edged Sweden, and eviscerated Switzerland in a quarterfinal. They extra narrowly beat the Slovak staff in the semifinal however superior with far much less of a combat than their Russian counterparts.

But it was the Russians who scored first on Sunday. Mikhail Grigorenko, a ahead who was on Russia’s gold medal-winning staff in 2018 and beforehand performed in the N.H.L., sliced a shot towards the online, the place, with nearly 13 minutes to play in the primary, it streaked previous Finland’s Harri Sateri.

The Finns tied the sport early in the second, when Ville Pokka, a Finnish defenseman, took a shot from the rink’s edge, proper in entrance of his personal bench and simply yards forward of the blue line. The puck zipped previous a Finn, a Russian and Ivan Fedotov, the 25-year-old netminder who was born in Finland however reared in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Fedotov opened the third interval with extra distress: Just 31 seconds in, Hannes Bjorninen redeemed an earlier penalty field stint by taking a straight-on shot on the Russian web.

When it went in, with out a lot resistance from Fedotov, the Finnish delegation seated close to the centerline erupted and raised the nation’s flag.

The Russians predictably mounted a collection of fearsome, determined tries as minutes drained from the clock.

They killed an influence play with simply greater than six minutes remaining, maintaining them — and their very own ambitions — inside a single shot of the Finns.

But the objective horn by no means sounded once more. Finland, which first performed Olympic hockey in 1952, would lastly get its gold medal.