Summit 72 is a four-part documentary series that tells the definitive story of the legendary 1972 Canada-USSR Summit Series of Hockey. Watch on CBC Gem now.
On Sept. 2, 1972, Canadians were stunned when the Soviet Union defeated Team Canada 7-3 in Game 1 of the Summit Series on hallowed Montreal Forum ice. The story is told in Summit 72, a four-part documentary series.
A Canadian hockey visionary named Lloyd Percival was one of the few who saw the defeat coming. He knew how good the Soviet team was — and why.
Growing up in Toronto in the 1920s, Percival excelled at cricket, tennis, boxing and, of course, hockey. A head coach at just 18 years old, Percival led Toronto’s National Sea Fleas midget team to an undefeated season in 1932. He travelled extensively throughout the United States and Great Britain, seeking all the coaching wisdom and fitness instruction he could garner from professionals outside of Canada. By 1944, Percival had a hit CBC radio program called Sports College, where he’d share what he’d learned with his fellow Canadians. The success of the radio program led him to write two very important books: How to Play Better Hockey, and Percival’s most famous work, The Hockey Handbook.
Watch Lloyd Percival discuss Russian hockey dominance in a 1968 broadcast of The Day It Is.
Speaking to CBC’s The Day It Is in 1968, Lloyd Percival outlined how the Soviets were making advances in athletic training and strategy.
Meanwhile, behind the Iron Curtain, the Soviet Union was focused on finding success at the highest level of international sport, believing that if the world saw they had the best athletes, it would prove their way of life was superior to the West’s. One of the main sports the Soviet Union targeted was hockey. Their cold climate and a popular game called bandy — which resembles hockey, but with soccer nets and field hockey sticks — meant there was an existing foundation they could build on.
Tasked with building the hockey program was Anatoly Tarasov, a man who would become known as the “father of Russian hockey.” Tarasov was just as passionate a student as he was a teacher, reading any literature on sport and fitness he could find, including The Hockey Handbook, which he reportedly referred to as “the hockey bible.”
We can never know exactly how much Percival’s instructional book influenced Tarasov and Russian hockey, but there were many striking…
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