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Afghanistan hockey rink is being transported to Canada



An Afghanistan hockey rink at the Kandahar airport is being dismantled and transported to Canada for preservation.

More than a decade ago, Canadian soldiers established a hockey rink at the Kandahar airport in southern Afghanistan (Afghanistan Times, 12 January 2016). Now, two years after Canada’s official mission in Afghanistan finished, the hockey rink has been dismantled and its boards are on their way home – to Canada.

At its peak, Kandahar Airfield housed more than 50,000 people.

The near-regulation size rink was home to hundreds of games – in the middle of the desert in the middle of a conflict zone – including a four-on-four hockey 24-team league that had 21 teams from Canada, one from the United States, and two teams from Slovakia.

Most teams had about 10 players, said Captain Travis Smyth who spent seven months in Afghanistan in 2010 with the Royal Canadian Regiment based in Petawawa, Ontario. ‘The matches were fairly competitive,’ he said to CBC Ottawa’s ‘All in a Day’ program. Games were about 30 minutes long, with about two games a week.

The hockey rink will be re-assembled at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa and at the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto. The plan is for a portion of the rink’s boards to arrive at the Canadian War Museum by February, said Stephen Quick, the museum’s director-general. ‘Once the boards arrive, museum staff will first make sure they’re sturdy enough to be exhibited.’

The Canadian War Museum will find a way to properly fit the story of the airfield’s hockey rink into the greater context of the Afghan conflict before putting the boards on display. Part of that process, said Quick, will involve conducting interviews with soldiers who played on the rink. ‘Each mark on that board is like a brushstroke. And each one of those brushstrokes represents some form of contact with the board, and with the lives that were there’ and the stories surrounding the Kandahar hockey rink. He added that it was ‘really important for us to have the iconic piece that then is kind of like the foundation for those stories.’

The Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto will also receive a portion of the rink’s boards. No arrival date or exhibition date has yet been set.

‘When I think about it now, it seems a little bit surreal that I was playing hockey on a rink in the middle of a desert, in the middle of a war zone … It seems a little crazy, but it certainly was a great relief for the troops that got to play on it,’ said Captain Travis Smyth.




Photographs: Global Affairs Canada


http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/kandahar-airfield-hockey-rink-to-be-preserved-in-canada-1.3919886

http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/matthew-fisher-last-game-has-been-played-at-canadas-ball-hockey-rink-in-kandahar-and-its-headed-home



MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
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