It’s been 66 years since Australia last played Olympic ice hockey. Can we ever get back there?

All they needed was formal permission from the Australian Olympic Federation – but they never got a response.

That tension – between enthusiasm and indifference, ambition and reality – sums up the history of ice hockey in Australia, a sport that exists on the outermost margins of our national consciousness, even though it shares plenty of traits with other codes we admire and obsess over.

The obstacles to progress are, and always have been, financial, structural, cultural, and practically insurmountable.

Or are they?

If you ask Ryan Switzer, statistically the greatest coach in Australian ice hockey history, one of the many things holding the sport back is a dearth of creative thinking.

The Mighty Roos’ ranking has hovered around the mid-30s for most of the time such rankings have been maintained – except for a brief purple patch in the early 1990s, when they rose to a high of 23rd, jumping 13 places in two years.

A Canadian ex-professional who grew up playing junior hockey alongside future NHL great Mark Messier, Switzer moved to Australia in his late 30s and took on the job of coaching the national team precisely because of the enormity of the challenge.

Switzer understood that trying to play “normal” hockey against full-time professionals was pointless, given Australia’s lack of quality and depth. They would get blown away, as they were early in his tenure, when he exposed them against the best-quality sides they could face.

“I did four world championships. I always took my team over to Canada to play against exhibition teams – and we got our asses kicked. But that’s exactly what I wanted,” he said.

So he came up with a different plan: instead of chasing the puck, his team deliberately gave it away.

“We played a style that had never been played before in hockey,” Switzer said.

“Instead of trying to force and take the puck off them, which they are so good at and are used to it … we just got out of the way and said, ‘We know where you’re going, 20,000 people in this building know where you’re going, so off you go. You go down and take a shot on our goaltender and we’ll make sure that you can’t pass it to anybody else because we’ll cover them.’

“If you’ve watched ice hockey, nobody does that. We spend all our lives passing it 30,000 times, tic-tac-toe and fancy before we get there – and now all of a sudden, you literally had players who didn’t know what to do and their coaches were screaming at them.”

The aim was disruption. And it worked.

The teams they played against – some were prestigious hockey countries, who had to play down in their division of the world championships following the breakup of the Soviet Union – wanted to treat their matches against also-rans Australia as practice for their more important match-ups, but they couldn’t. The high point of this era was an 8-1 win over Hungary, whose players mocked the Mighty Roos before the match when they saw them practicing their bizarre set-up, but ended up arguing with each other about what to do.

Switzer’s men became greater than the sum of their parts; he fondly recalls telling this story to a room full of NHL executives, who responded with amazement about how the Aussies briefly upset the established order of ice hockey.

“It was pretty cool,” Switzer said.

But when Switzer stepped away, normal service resumed for the Australian team, his idea on how to progress the sport weren’t taken forward, and their ranking dropped to where it was – and where it has remained since.

So how does Australia break the circuit?

The truth is even if another Switzer came up with a spectacular new left-field tactic, there are so many other roadblocks in the way.

For starters, there are only about a dozen rinks in Australia where ice hockey can be played – and about 6000 registered players, not including the extra 4000 or so who play in “beer leagues”, or amateur competitions which don’t fall under IHA’s auspices. Those players have to compete for “ice time” with other sports, such as skating and curling – and those rinks tend to be run by private entities which prioritise casual users, from which they can make more money to recoup on their sizeable investment.

The “nirvana” for Australian ice hockey, Kitching said, would be if IHA owned its own rink; nothing special, just a pre-fabricated concrete structure with room for 500 spectators, the kind he commonly sees across North America. Having sketched out a business model, he is convinced it would be more than viable.

The problem is capital; it’d cost at least $20 million to build, and they receive no funding from the Australian Sports Commission.

“The challenge is, how do you get the government to invest in ice hockey versus football, versus rugby union?” Kitching said.

To get anywhere, ice hockey needs to attack the problem from both directions, which they’re trying to do.

From the bottom up, IHA receives support from the NHL for an inline hockey program, which is successful, and from the International Ice Hockey Federation to help sustain their grassroots programs. At a national level, the Australian Ice Hockey League has a modest following, but it has expanded to 10 teams, and is faring better than the domestic competitions for two of the other “big four” American sports, gridiron and baseball – though Switzer argues the AIHL doesn’t have enough imports in it to meaningfully lift the broader standard of the game.

In any case, anyone who’s any good simply has to leave the country to be any chance of turning it into their profession.

“If you want to make it, you’re not going to make it playing in Australia. That’s the cold hard truth,” said Nathan Walker, Australia’s only NHL star, told this masthead two years ago; somehow, he convinced his parents to let him move to the Czech Republic at age 13. “It’s just kind of the way it is.”

From the top down, the increasing visibility of the NHL in Australia – the historic pre-season games played in Melbourne in 2023 were regarded as a huge success – and the valuable spikes in popularity from the Winter Olympics and periodic pop culture crazes like Netflix’s Heated Rivalry help put the sport closer to the front of people’s minds.

Homegrown heroes like Walker, who won the Stanley Cup in 2018, certainly don’t hurt, either.

“If you can continue that, then it drives the bottom to at least get involved – and you’ve got to make sure you have the quality of the coaching, and all that kind of stuff,” Switzer said. “It was always said we couldn’t improve, but it’s been done before.”

Another Olympic appearance in men’s hockey, though, is a genuine pipe dream.

Qualification is brutally exclusive; only 12 teams make it, and the top eight do so directly based on rankings. Add in the host nation, and that leaves three to four slots up for grabs every Olympic cycle.

Countries outside the top eight have to run a multi-stage gauntlet; Australia, for instance, would have to win a sudden death pre-qualification tournament just to have a shot from their position in the IIHF’s Division II A. Even if they did, they’d then have to upset multiple hockey nations, whose squads are packed with professionals and have deep, successful developmental systems – but no team from outside the world’s top 20 has made it in the modern era, and Australia has never beaten a top-15 side at a meaningful tournament.

And that’s without considering how hard it is for the Mighty Roos just to assemble in the first place.

Today’s team is a mixture of North American and European expats, mixed with locals who learned their trade in Australia and play in the AIHL – but just to play overseas, it costs them about $5000 per head. They pay for themselves.

And, of course, they all have jobs.

“We’d need a whole series of miracles,” Kitching said.

For these reasons, Australia did not attempt to qualify for Milan Cortina 2026, and have not tried for a Winter Olympics spot for some time.

There is, however, another small glimmer of hope: women’s ice hockey, which has been part of the Olympics since 1998.

Because of the slower pace of development of the women’s game, there are fewer “better” nations in the way, and therefore a shorter pathway exists, if Australia is willing to take it.

“We’re a long way behind the US and Canada, but if we had a concerted, structured program and plan over, say, a 15-year horizon – the next three to four cycles – it’s doable,” Kitching said.

“It would be hard, but it is absolutely possible to do it.”

Until then, we’ll just have to watch on in amazement from afar.

The Winter Olympic Games is broadcast on the 9Network, 9Now and Stan Sport.

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