The world’s longest hockey game in Alberta broke several records this year.
From February 4th to 24 hours a day, in record cold weather, 40 people took turns playing hockey at the outdoor skating rink near Edmonton.
A team named Team Hope and Team Cure broke the Guinness World Records with a 252 hour mark around 6am on Monday. The final score of the game was 2,649 to 2,528 on Team Hope.
“It was great,” Kate Gallagher, one of the organizers of the event, said in an interview.
She said the seventh edition of the game has raised more than $ 1.8 million (higher than the $ 1.5 million target) so far for cancer research at the University of Alberta.
This year, with special rules for dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, the event was first started in 2003 by Dr. Brent Sike, who lost his father to cancer. He continued to do so after his wife died of the disease.
The game is always played at the outdoor skating rink in the Cyc countryside near Sherwood Park in Alta. Players who fell into the “NHL-style bubble” had to deal with the frigid weather that lasted most of the 10 days.
When the player passed the puck along the board, the puck shattered, the skate blade broke in half, the mask shards fell when the glue was released, and the goalkeeper’s pad broke in the terrible cold. Sometimes the wind chill caused the temperature to drop from -40 ° C to -55 ° C.
“This was arguably the coldest game we’ve ever seen,” Gallagher said.
“It was all part of the adventure. The players were troupes. They were warriors.”
Alberta outdoor hockey player breaks record and raises $ 1.8 million for cancer research