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
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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