Canadians hoping resilience will lead them back to women's hockey gold
CBC
When members of the Canadian women's hockey team learned their first Olympic game against Finland was postponed on Thursday, some players just laughed.
"This is so classic," assistant captain Blayre Turnbull said a few hours before the puck dropped on the team's actual Olympic opener, a 4-0 win over Switzerland, on Saturday.
"This is exactly what happens to our group. We’ve experienced this before."
Sixteen of the Canadian team's 23 players were part of a dominant, gold-medal performance in 2022 in the midst of COVID-19 restrictions. They spent weeks alone in hotel rooms throughout the pandemic, all to play a handful of games.
Another two players, Kristin O'Neill and Julia Gosling, were reserves on the 2022 Olympic team. They spent their Olympics as far away from the team as possible and never got to play.
So a change of plans, caused by a norovirus outbreak on the Finnish team, didn't come close to fazing this team.
It's that resilience, fuelled by a group of veterans who've been there and seen just about everything, that Canada hopes will take it all the way to back to gold.
It was one of those veterans, Natalie Spooner, who finally broke the dam for Canada on Saturday against Switzerland, after throwing tons of shots at a Swiss goaltender who kept shutting the door.
Spooner was in her office in front of the net on the team's first power-play unit when she got her stick on the puck, slipping it behind Switzerland's Saskia Maurer.
Over the last four years, Spooner has played every role imaginable on this team, from the top six to extra forward, which is where she was slotted on Saturday. No matter what line she plays on, she's always hard to move in front of the net.
Off the ice, she worked her way back medical issues related to childbirth and a serious knee injury. You could see the emotion in her face in a video posted by Hockey Canada that showed Spooner getting the call to go to her fourth Olympic Games.
Resilience has been her calling card, and this one meant just a little bit more.
"I'm going to do whatever it takes for my team to win this tournament," Spooner said earlier this week. "Hopefully, I can have a big impact and help us win a gold medal."
Heading into Saturday's game, Canada had defeated fifth-ranked Switzerland in all five Olympic games they'd played.
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