IIHF – Their best days

In the early 2000s, no team had ever won the Olympic gold and the Ice Hockey World Championship in the same year.  It sounds unfathomable at first, but it should be remembered that between 1920 and 1968, the Olympic hockey tournament doubled as the Ice Hockey World Championship for that year.
 
However, between 1972 and 2006, there were seven years when the Olympics and the Worlds were held within a few months, and no team had ever won both tournaments in the first six occasions. Not even the Soviet Union had done it in Sapporo and Prague in 1972 or in Innsbruck and Katowice in 1976 when they had their chance. 
 
Then came the Swedes in 2006. Tre Kronor beat Finland in the Olympic final in Turin and the followed it up by going all the way in Riga where they downed Czechia in the final.
 
“The margin of error is so slim, and you need to have some luck on your side. It was an incredible year, or spring, for us. And when the guys from Detroit came, the atmosphere in the group got even better,” says Bengt-Ake Gustafsson, who coached the winning teams, and held the acceptance speech when the 2006 Team Sweden received the 2025 Milestone Award in Stockholm.

Of the eight players on both teams – Mika Hannula, Ronnie Sundin, Jörgen Jönsson, Kenny Jönsson, Stefan Liv and the “Detroit guys” Niklas Kronwall, Mikael Samuelsson, Henrik Zetterberg – the last five were present at the ceremony. Stefan Liv, who perished in the Lokomotiv Yaroslavl plane crash in 2011, was represented by his widow Anna.

 

“It’s hard to really understand the importance of such things when you’re playing in the tournament. You’re just happy about having gone all the way. The Worlds and the Olympics are short tournaments, and you have to be at your best during those two weeks,” Zetterberg said.

 

“And the fact that our team, the Detroit Red Wings, got ousted early from the playoffs in the NHL opened the door for us to play in the Ice Hockey World Championship. The timing was great.”

 

The Olympic tournament was short, and the players wanted to focus on the games, says Gustafsson.

 

“In one of the early meetings some of them asked me if I was a ‘video guy’. I said I wasn’t, and they were happy to hear it because they had got tired of watching video in North America. So, we kept our video meetings short and only brought up the most important things,” he says with a laugh.

 

 

For some of the players, 2006 came at…