Team Canada has been kept off the orientation camp ice due to the prohibitive cost of insuring its players.
Steve Yzerman, the executive director of the national men’s hockey team for Canada that is headed to the Sochi Olympics, has announced the insurance news that the coverage for the players was too costly for them to be able to take part in their orientation camp.
Though he said that he’d like to have had the players practice, the costs were too high to make that happen.
The four day orientation camp is now the center of insurance news headlines as Hockey Canada found the price of coverage too high to send the team to Calgary on Sunday. For the team, the camp will now consist of informal meetings off the ice, which will be held on the subject of Olympics in Sochi, Russia, in 2013. It is meant to help to build team chemistry, even without having skated together.
Yzerman insists that this insurance news isn’t the “end of the world” for the team.
Instead, he explained in his insurance news statement that “There’s lot of other things that need to be done in preparation, logistically going through how we’re going to get there, where we’ll stay, where family and friends may stay, a walkthrough of the venues, drug testing policy, a lot of informational things we need to go through and get out of the way. This is a good time to do it.”
Due to the expensive insurance news, all forty seven players on the Canadian team – made up of 25 forwards, 17 defensemen, and 5 goalies – all arrived in Calgary, yesterday, and made their way to the Canada Olympic Park where the headquarters for Hockey Canada is located on the west side of the city. When all is said and done, there will be 22 skaters and 3 goalies going to Sochi.
Among those who were held back by this insurance news but who are in attendance in Calgary are 15 of the players who won gold at the Vancouver Olympics in 2010, including Sidney Crosby who won the winning goal in that game.
