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⚽ Sports and games 🏄 Water and snow

Ice hockey

Ice hockey

📖 In short

Ice hockey is a very fast game played by two teams on an ice rink. Each team has six players who skate in special boots and hit a black puck of hard rubber with long curved sticks, trying to get it into the other team's goal.

🤩 Did you know?

  • National teams have competed internationally in ice hockey since 1924.
  • A Soviet team played famous games against Canada in 1972.
  • A game has three periods of 20 minutes each.
  • The puck can fly at more than 150 kilometers an hour.

🔎 Find out more

🌟 The flying puck

In ice hockey there's no ball, but a small flat rubber puck. It's chilled before the game so it doesn't bounce too much, and it flies across the ice very fast.

🔍 Protective gear

Players wear helmets, thick gloves and shoulder and leg pads because the game is fast and collisions happen a lot. The goalkeeper wears huge pads and a mask.

💡 Quick changes

The game is very tiring, so the coach changes players about every minute, with fresh players jumping onto the ice while tired ones come off to rest.

🎯 Hockey countries

Ice hockey is very popular in cold countries like Canada, Russia, Sweden, Finland and the United States, where children learn it on frozen lakes.

🧩 Test yourself

1 What do ice hockey players hit?

2 How many players from each team are on the ice?

3 A game has three periods of ?? minutes each.

4 Which picture shows “Ice hockey”?

⚽ Discover more

📷 Picture sources: Wikimedia Commons