Where is ice hockey most popular ?

Ice hockey is one of the sports featured in the Winter Olympics. Check out Where is ice hockey most popular ?

Where is ice hockey most popular ?

The modern sport of ice hockey was developed in Canada, most notably in Montreal, where the first indoor game was played on March 3, 1875.

Ice hockey is immensely popular in Canada, where it is the national winter sport and arguably the country’s most popular game.

Hockey is also popular in the United States and in European countries such as Russia, Sweden, and Finland. More than a million registered athletes play regularly in leagues worldwide.

Some characteristics of that game, such as the length of the ice rink and the use of a puck, have been retained to this day. Amateur ice hockey leagues began in the 1880s, and professional ice hockey originated around 1900.

The Stanley Cup, emblematic of ice hockey club supremacy, was initially commissioned in 1892 as the “Dominion Hockey Challenge Cup” and was first awarded in 1893 to recognize the Canadian amateur champion and later became the championship trophy of the National Hockey League (NHL).

In the early 1900s, the Canadian rules were adopted by the Ligue Internationale de Hockey Sur Glace, in Paris, France, the precursor of the International Ice Hockey Federation. The sport was played for the first time at the Olympics during the 1920 Summer Olympics.

While women also played during the game’s early formative years, also it was not until organizers began to officially remove body checking from female ice hockey beginning in the mid-1980s that it began to gain greater popularity, which by then had spread to Europe and a variety of other countries.

Also the first IIHF Women’s World Championship was held in 1990, and women’s play was introduced into the Olympics in 1998.