A hockey mania has broken out in the Czech Republic, at which many from abroad stare in disbelief. The ongoing world championships in Prague and Ostrava are even close to breaking their own nine-year-old record.
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Interview with a fan who intends to attend 21 matches | Video: Radek Bartoníček
The contrast with the previous world championship, the main part of which took place in Tampere, Finland, is striking.
At home, the Finns never once sold out the new arena with a decent, but not dizzying, capacity of 13,455 seats.
At the World Cup in full swing in the Czech Republic, they attract on average well over 16,000 people per match. Or 15,780 if you don’t count the race against the home selection. And they didn’t bring any stellar selection to Prague.
There are a lot of surprising numbers. Even in Ostrava. A full hall, i.e. 9,109 spectators, was attracted, for example, by the match between outsiders France and Kazakhstan at noon on Saturday.
Finnish daily Evening News he described with astonishment that at the same time almost 17 thousand people came to the match between Canada and Great Britain in Prague, even though the Czechs did not play against Norway until the evening.
“The Czech Republic is a hockey nation,” described Jussi Paasi from the station Ylewhen he experienced a “hellish atmosphere” in the home match against Finland.
“When the puck hit the ice, the decibels soared to unimaginable heights. I haven’t experienced anything like this for almost a decade, even though I had plenty of opportunities to watch the world championship or other hockey matches live as part of my work,” the journalist began.
“The last time I witnessed such a ruckus in the same arena was in 2015, when the Czech Republic knocked out the Finns in the quarter-finals,” he continued.
During his current visit to Prague, he also recalled the past two championships in Tampere, which was promoted as the “home of hockey” in this context.
“But it was quiet at home. In the second case, downright sleepy. Compared to the crazy atmosphere in the Czech Republic, the atmosphere practically did not exist,” he noted.
“The home of ice hockey should look and sound like this,” he added to the Prague atmosphere. He was only bothered by the fans who, despite the rules, occupied part of the media stand.
In total, the championship attracted over 290,000 spectators in the first five days, i.e. almost as many as the entire WC 2002 in Sweden.
“We are completely excited about it. We have 99 percent positive feedback,” says Jan Kuklík, its spokesman, on behalf of the organizing committee.
The goal is to break the record from the Czech World Championship 2015, which reached a total attendance of 741,690 people and after five days was about 256,000.
So far, the current championship is doing about 13 percent better.
Among other things, a slight increase in the capacity of the halls helped – in Prague by 30 seats, in Ostrava by almost 300. There, the organizers “found” new seats mainly thanks to the hanging of a television studio above the grandstand.
A higher capacity, even if only slight in the case of Prague, will help mainly in the Czech and Slovak matches, which are hopelessly sold out.
“But it’s still hard to say if we’ll reach the record,” notes Kuklík cautiously. “Now we have some less attractive matches during the week, for which we offered tickets to schools and hockey clubs, for example. The big unknown is the quarter-finals and semi-finals. It depends on how the teams are placed in the group and what the distribution of individual matches will be.”
A possible elimination of the Czechs in the quarter-finals could cool the hockey mania.
But when this scenario came up in Prague 2004, the subsequent medal matches still filled the giant hall almost to bursting.
