I have been finding out about the 1920 Olympic ice hockey tournament.

Two reasons: 1. it was the first; 2. it was part of a Summer, not a Winter, Olympics.

Because of this I thought it might bolster the case for a reform I tend to bang on about at this point in the Olympic cycle: namely that the respective sizes of the Summer and Winter Games should be evened up by transferring some indoor sports - volleyball, handball, track cycling - from Summer to Winter.

After all, if ice hockey could glide smoothly from one to another 90 or so years ago, why shouldn't other sports make the same transition today?

I expect, if it ever happened, the sports chosen to make the switch would shout and scream, but to me it is almost a no-brainer for the Movement.

If ice hockey can feature in the Summer Olympics, why can't sports like track cycling be moved to the Winter Games? ©AFP/Getty Images



At a stroke you could make the Summer Olympics significantly less unwieldy, while adding greatly to the appeal of the Winter Games in parts of the world where the water never freezes.

Such a reform might also be used to ease the passage of more new, youth-friendly sports and disciplines - squash, say, or 3x3 basketball - into the Olympics by offering them a place on the Winter programme, as opposed to its overcrowded Summer counterpart.

In point of fact, that 1920 tournament is not as much help in buttressing my argument as I had hoped.

For one thing, as many of you will instantly have spotted, there was no such thing as the Winter Olympics in 1920; the first was held at Chamonix in 1924.

For another, the sporting calendar was considerably less crowded in those days, and John Logie Baird's first demonstration of moving silhouette images by television was still five years away.

There was hence no obstacle to events at a single Games being spread over several months, in this case from April to September, with the ice hockey confined to late April.

No matter; this inaugural Olympic tournament seems to have been a fascinating affair in its own right, not least because the Czechoslovakian team were able to skate away with the bronze medals in spite of a scoring aggregate of one goal for and 31 against.

Before the first Winter Olympics in 1924, the Antwerp Games of 1920 saw the first ice hockey tournament staged ©Getty Images

As implied by that sort of statistic, the competition had a built-in imbalance owing to the fact that the sport was, at that time, much better established across the Atlantic than in Europe.

The two North American teams - Canada and the United States - were therefore far stronger than the five European entrants - Czechoslovakia, Sweden, France, host nation Belgium and Switzerland.

The US actually beat the Swiss 29-0.

That said, most of the players who represented Canada - members of the Winnipeg Falcons club - were of Icelandic heritage.

Iceland itself has still never won an Olympic gold medal, the closest it has come being the silvers picked up by triple jumper Vilhjálmur Einarsson at the Melbourne Games of 1956 and the men's handball team six years ago in Beijing.

So perhaps it should claim some credit for that one.

The tournament's hard luck story was provided by Sweden, who won three games, and even managed a goal against the mighty Canadians, yet finished out of the medals after losing the key match 1-0 to the Czechs.

They seem, above all, to have been victims of the competition's strange structure, which saw them play six matches in seven days, and the Czechs only three.

After falling behind early in this crucial encounter, they appear, nevertheless, to have dominated the match without once being able to score.

Ice hockey at the Winter Olympics has gone from strength to strength, with the Canadian team winning at home in Vancouver in 2010 ©Getty Images



A splendid paper on the tournament by Kenth Hansen, entitled The Birth of Swedish Ice Hockey - Antwerp 1920, relates that according to Dagens Nyheter, a Swedish newspaper, the shot-count was 48-2 in Sweden's favour.

The 24-page document, available here.

It seems that in Sweden at this time, while a not dissimilar sport called bandy was widely practiced, ice hockey was not.

Assembly of an Olympic team had, therefore, to be done from scratch, to the extent that sticks had to be ordered from the US.

As Hansen writes: "The sticks arrived by SS Stockholm at the beginning of February, but were held up in the customs at Gothenburg.

"Several customs officers had been suspended because of theft of incoming goods, and the sticks remained in Gothenburg for the entire ice training period...

"Thus bandy sticks had to be used during training, which naturally made it hard to achieve the right stick technique until the proper American sticks finally arrived."

Getting to the Games does not sound a whole lot easier. Writes Hansen:

"The team travelled by third class train via Trelleborg and Sassnitz to Berlin, where Molander and Säfwenberg joined the team.

"The sight of the star player Nisse Molander was somewhat of a shock.

"He had had a cerebral haemorrhage, and was still so ill that he had to be led onboard the train."

Molander nevertheless played four of his team's six matches.

The tournament's defining clash was the fifth of the 10 games, the showdown between the US and Canada, which the Canadians won 2-0.

The clash between Canada and the USA was the defining moment of the Antwerp 1920 tournament...the two nations world meet again four years later at the first Winter Games in Chamonix ©Getty Images



Hansen quotes at length the report of a Swedish journalist, capturing the electric impact that what he calls "the best game yet seen in Europe" must have had on spectators in the sold-out stands of Antwerp's Ice Palace.

"Every single player on the rink was a perfect acrobat on skates," the report reads.

"The small puck was moved at an extraordinary speed around the rink in all directions, so that the spectators almost became giddy, and the players fought for it like seagulls that flutter about after bread crusts from a boat."...

The goalkeepers "had an inconceivable ability to be in the right position to fend off the [puck], even before the spectators had had time to realize there had been a shot.

"A few times the Canadian goalkeeper had to stop the puck with his hand, and despite his thick gloves his fingers were smashed until they bled."

Breathtaking stuff.

It has been largely forgotten today, but I would say that first US v Canada Olympic ice hockey match deserves to rank alongside Finnish long-distance runner Paavo Nurmi's three gold medals and one silver, Italian Nedo Nadi's five fencing golds and 72-year-old Swede Oscar Swahn's gold in shooting, making him the oldest Olympic champion, among the highlights of those Antwerp Games.

An outstanding website devoted to the first Canadian Olympic ice hockey champions may be found by clicking here.

David Owen worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the 2010 World Cup and London 2012. To follow Owen on Twitter click here.