Sport & Fitness

Back in the 1950s, London boasted three arenas staging ice hockey: the Empire Pool at Wembley, Harringay and Earls Court. Each operated two teams and, for a few years, all three venues staged virtual sell-out matches simultaneously on Saturday nights – meaning 22,500 people watched hockey in the capital every week. But like speedway and greyhound racing, two other sports that boomed in post-war Britain, ice hockey has suffered a slow decline ever since. Feature continues

Last November, it hit rock bottom when the London Racers – the only professional club left in the capital – quit the Elite League in mid-season when a player suffered facial injuries after colliding with an object protruding from a barrier. A week later, a spectator was hurt when the safety glass around the rink shattered.

The club alleged that the owners of the Lee Valley Ice Centre had not addressed key safety issues, a claim refuted by the Lee Valley Regional Park Authority. Meanwhile, the lower-league Lee Valley Lions, who also play at the centre, stated that they had no problems with the facilities – suggesting that the incidents were a convenient get-out for the Racers’ management. Cynics quipped that the fan hurt by the glass must have been very unlucky to be in the wrong place since crowds had dwindled to around 300.

Elite League chairman Eamon Convery declared that London should be ‘ashamed of its inability to provide facilities for such a widely acclaimed international sport’. It was a comment given added resonance by the fact that, three years earlier, even John Prescott’s favourite American proved unable to make the game pay when the London Knights set-up in Docklands, bankrolled by Philip Anschutz, also folded.

A decade ago, Britain’s most famous basketball player and entrepreneur, Alton Byrd, told Time Out that the best way for second-tier sports such as ice hockey and his own to develop was to concentrate on provincial cities and the satellite towns around London. It’s a model that both have adopted, with hockey drawing good attendances at Nottingham’s National Ice Centre and arenas in Belfast, Cardiff, Sheffield and Manchester. Meanwhile, teams continue to operate successfully from smaller rinks such as Slough, Bracknell, Romford and Guildford.

Those four semi-pro English Premier League clubs are in towns with fewer competing attractions while the amateurs of Streatham Redskins, Haringey Greyhounds and Lee Valley, who play in the English National League, don’t have salaries to meet. But all that leaves a yawning gap at the top end, where the ten-team Elite League is, with the exception of Basingstoke Bison, based entirely in the Midlands, the north and Scotland. The airline BMI Baby can hardly have imagined that the league they have just sponsored in a seven-year deal would be without any presence whatsoever in the capital city.

There is one advantage to the fact that the best ice hockey on offer around London this winter will be played in a semi-pro league: stability, and with it the knowledge for fans that the team they watch on a Saturday night is unlikely to be defunct by Monday morning. But with Britain aiming to qualify for the 2010 Olympics and raise the sport’s profile even higher, it’s a very small crumb of comfort.