No "I" in Team

behold.....the 2006 Italian Women's Hockey Team

Somewhere between Dick Cheney shooting his hunting partner and the Hallmark Valentine hype machine you may have missed the 2006 Italian Women's Hockey Team. Like any good underdog story with a seemingly impossible, implausible plot line you probably won't miss this tale for too long. I suspect it will be turned into Hollywood gold (a la Cool Runnings) even before the flame of Torino is extinguished.

For some reason or another it is the custom of international, olympic hockey to grant a bye to the team of the nation that hosts the olympics. Instead of working to get there....they just get to be there.

Italy is not known as a hockey powerhouse....in fact women's hockey is barely in existance. "Few Italians play hockey at an elite level, especially women. The women are battling cultural taboos against women playing sports while trying to build a team and compete in their first Olympics.""Men aren't used to women with a stick, and they think you are a little crazy," said Waltraud Kaser, a forward on the team.

You can imagine what happened next.

"After all, in four days of Olympic competition, the Italians played three games, were outscored by 32-1 and did not advance out of pool play. In contrast, Canada, the gold medal favorite, has outscored its opponents by 36-1. In their opening game Saturday, Canada beat Italy, 16-0, the most lopsided result in the history of Olympic women's hockey. Two days later, the Italians lost, 11-0, to Sweden."

The Canada match up was especially interesting if you look at the total pool of players the nations had to select from. Italy has a total of 373 female players compared to Canada's 66,000.

So what's the moral of this story....I'm not sure? You got the David and Goliath thing going on except that Goliath wound up whooping David's ass! You have the feel good deal about a group of determined ladies going out there to challege cultural taboo and sexist ideology and I guess they kind of did that....sort of.

Hey wait a minute....this is a totally shitty plot line for a movie. And Cool Runnings sucked. My bad. Happy Olympics!