Boys Against Men
Team USA Men's hockey 1980 Gold Medal is an extraordinary, singular achievement, and nothing before since, or in the future can compare to this place, time, and circumstance, so don't even try.
We’ll drop the pill on Men’s Olympic hockey tomorrow, and for the first time since Sochi in 2014, NHL players will participate. I don’t like it - this devil’s bargain of stopping the season right after the NFL is done, sending your best assets halfway across the world to risk injury so close to the playoffs, while the rest of your membership is getting shitfaced on the beaches in Cabo - but that’s not this piece.
This piece is about what happened in 1980, and why it won’t and can’t ever happen again. There is and never can be a comparison. Even though all nations are represented here again.
Well, some, but not all are here. Notably absent, the Russians, who for several decades half-a-century ago dominated the world stage like nobody else before or since.
The Russians are banned from competing in the 2026 Olympics by the IOC, primarily over their 2022 invasion of Ukraine. There are other violations in recent history too, related to a long-standing history of doping - and of getting caught doping. Individuals from Russia can compete, but they must meet strict requirements. There’s no hockey team, and no individual medals awarded will go toward a national total.
I called the 2018 Winter Olympics hockey (men’s and women’s) in South Korea for Westwood One and NBC Sports Radio. NHL players weren’t there of course, but the Russians were, competing under the OAR (Olympic Athletes of Russia) flag. They won gold and had a few ex-NHL-ers on the squad including Ilya Kovalchuk and Pavel Datsyuk, and future star Kirill Kaprizov. Even with just a few big names they ran over the field.
Just like the good ole days…
So for 2026, it means that there’s one big contending team out before the games begin, leaving for most fans and hockey folk a prime focus on two teams, and only two teams - The United States, and Canada (the betting favorite). But, don’t sleep on Finland or Sweden, and once it gets to the medal round, a bad night can end anyone’s gold fever dreams.
The absent team and country can tell you about that - about one really bad night at the Olympics that cost them gold. It was February 22, 1980, at Lake Placid, New York and it was a doozy. The team that never lost, the team that legend told us smoked cigarettes and drank vodka all day in saunas, then went out and destroyed competent opponents, had one really really bad night in New York.
It happens.
Team USA’s college boys needed two big things to pull off the upset. One - they needed to play the best games of their lives and get every bounce available. They did.
The second thing they had to have was a cooperative opponent. You can’t pull something like this off without help from the Russians. They hadn’t lost an Olympic hockey game since 1964.
Let that sink in.
How did the whole thing happen? Why is it so unique? Why won’t there ever be anything even close to it? And how did that night, and those days play into the current and long-standing culture of the NHL which favors players born in North America and at the expense of players from outside the continent?
