Athlete Bios
Hockey
Wickenheiser aims for Olympic gold at home
Last Updated: Monday, February 8, 2010 | 12:56 PM ET
New York Times for CBC Sports
Canada's Hayley Wickenheiser plays professional men's hockey in Europe. (Phillip MacCallum/Getty Images)"The first time I put on skates, it was kind of made for me," Hayley Wickenheiser, the most famous female hockey player in the history of the game, said as she looked back to when she was five years old. "I just love playing the game."
But when Wickenheiser said that, she was not quite famous yet. In fact, it was 1994 and she was just 15, soon after being named to her first team Canada ahead of that year's IIHF Women's World Championship. At that tournament she went on to earn the first of her six world championship gold medals, as well as her first international point, an assist.
She has not stopped since. Wickenheiser has blazed an impressive trail for women's players to follow, scoring a total of 41 goals for her country in 52 Olympic or world championship games. She led both the 2002 and 2006 Olympic tournaments in scoring and was named the most valuable player in each.
And now, 16 years after recalling how hockey seemed to be made for her, Wickenheiser will be in Vancouver, wearing her familiar No. 22 at forward again as the captain of team Canada.
Wickenheiser, 31, was born in Shaunavon, Sask. Her cousin was Doug Wickenheiser, a junior star who went on to an 11-year NHL career. He died of cancer in 1999 at 37. Like so many top-level women's players, Hayley Wickenheiser grew up skating alongside and excelling against boys. But unlike other women's players, Wickenheiser has continued to skate with the men.
So emphatic was her performance at the 1998 Olympics that Bobby Clarke, the Philadelphia Flyers' general manager, invited Wickenheiser to the team's rookie camp the following two autumns. In 2002-03 she played for HC Salamat, a team in the Finnish third tier, becoming the first woman to score a goal in a men's professional league. In the playoffs she helped Salamat win promotion to the second tier by scoring a goal and six assists in 11 games, and stuck with the club for part of the next season. She spent the 2008-09 season with Eskilstuna Linden, a third-tier men's professional club in Sweden, and scored three goals and two assists in 21 games.
With Calgary Oval X-Treme at the top level of women's semipro hockey in North America, Wickenheiser was won three championships in five years - and is a good enough softball player to have played for Canada's Olympic team at the 2000 Sydney Games.
The big difference in men's and women's hockey is bodychecking, which is not permitted under women's rules.
"In the women's game, it's more about angling and steering them, and maybe rubbing them out along the boards," said the 5-foot-10, 171-pound Wickenheiser, who said she took maybe three "legitimately dirty, bad hits" in the Swedish league last season.
Odd how blasé Wickenheiser is about playing the men's game. "I guess I'd want to do that, but I don't know if it'd be realistic or even possible," she said, at age 15, when asked about someday playing with men. "The size and the strength difference is so incredible that it's pretty tough to do."
Over a long and proud career, pretty tough is exactly what Hayley Wickenheiser has proven to be.
