Newsflash: IOC to look into drinking celebrations on ice by women's hockey team

One day after the Women’s Ice Hockey Gold Medal game at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, B.C., and you’d think all the talk would be about what a great game the champions from Canada played: how well they were forechecking, how great their penalty kill was, how awesome rookie goaltender Shannon Szabados played, how many shots they blocked, how Marie-Philip Poulin proved on the world stage that she had earned the right to be called the “female Sidney Crosby.” Well, think again. The Canadian triumph and superlative team performance – the first gold medal victory by the home team since Women’s Hockey was introduced to the Olympics in 1998 – was overshadowed by the team’s post-game celebration that included drinking beer and champagne and smoking victory cigars on the ice at Hockey Canada place (pictured above), long after the crowd had departed into the dark, cold Vancouver evening and the millions of television viewers had turned the channel to catch the last 10 minutes of American Idol. The morning after the gold medal game, all you had to Google was “Canadian Women’s Olympic Hockey” and you were bombarded with article after article about how tacky and distasteful the Canadians choice of post-game celebration was. The uproar surrounding the celebration, conveyed in a number of different articles, including the focus of this Newflash, “IOC to look into drinking celebrations on ice by women's hockey team” by CBS Sports, is deeply entrenched in patriarchal ideology. In other words, the Associated Press and International Olympic Committee attacked the Canadian Women’s Hockey Team because they were women acting in ways that are not “ladylike” and doing things that are considered by socially constructed gender roles as inappropriate for women to do.

CBS Sports’ account of the post-game celebration, like most writing on the gold medal game, does not contain any relevant information about the hockey game itself. Instead, it describes how shortly after the game, the Canadian players returned to the ice and were “swigging from bottles of champagne, guzzling beer and smoking cigars.” Marie-Philip Poulin, the 18-year old phenom from Quebec who scored both of Canada’s goals in the game, was seen drinking cans of Molson Canadian with her teammates; Poulin is not of legal drinking age in British Columbia until next month when she turns 19, but is legal in her home province of Quebec. The International Olympic Committee commented on the incident, declaring that it is “not what we want to see…[We] don't think it's a good promotion of sport values. If they celebrate in the changing room, that's one thing, but not in public. We will investigate what happened.”

The Canadian team issued a statement shortly after the barrage of negative media attention that came its way, stating: “The members of Team Canada apologize if their on-ice celebrations, after fans had left the building, have offended anyone. In the excitement of the moment, the celebration left the confines of our dressing room and shouldn't have. The team regrets that its gold-medal celebration may have caused the IOC or COC any embarrassment. Our players and team vow to uphold the values of the Olympics moving forward and view this situation as a learning experience.”

The problem with this article and the fact that there was such huge uproar about this particular celebration is deeply rooted in patriarchal ideology. Since it was women, and not men choosing to celebrate in this way, the whole world got so up in arms because that is not how “ladies should” act. Forget that these women had spent the past year together in Calgary, Alberta, training and playing together every day and just won their third consecutive Olympic gold medal. Let’s just pretend that never happened, right? The bottom line to many people that took offense to the beer and the cigars is that women should not conduct themselves in such a manner; apparently it’s tacky, distasteful and unladylike. Yes, it did look a little silly when Charlene Labonte and Kim St-Pierre were sitting up against the boards at Hockey Canada Place, still wearing their jerseys and goalie pads drinking out of the biggest Molson Canadian bottle ever produced; but these women had just accomplished a goal that very few can say that they had achieved and they were simply savoring the moment. It must have been a slow news day because the media was really trying to make a story out of nothing, create drama where no drama existed. Nevertheless, it is likely that the press jumped at the opportunity to berate these women for acting in such an inappropriate manner; after all, it is shocking to most people that women can exude their joy by drinking a beer and smoking a victory cigar, since their male counterparts are the ones who generally act out these clichés.

While it is impossible to know precisely what kind of reaction the Canadian Men’s Team would have elicited following Sidney Crosby’s gold medal winning goal in overtime against the United States merely three days later, it is highly likely that it would have been chalked up to just “boys being boys.” Every year after a team wins the Stanley Cup (or any other major sports trophy), the cameras in the locker room catch the guys popping bottles of champagne, spraying it all over the room and chugging it out of the Cup. There are players under the legal drinking age – Jordan Staal from last year’s champion Pittsburgh Penguins was only 20 when his team won the Cup comes to mind – who have definitely had a beer or two after winning hockey’s ultimate prize. Team captain Hayley Wickenheiser agreed, stating, “It’s celebrating, it’s hockey, it’s a tradition we do. When we see a Stanley Cup winner, we see them spraying champagne all over the dressing room, you see 18-year-old kids there and nobody says a thing.” The reaction from the IOC and from the press clearly exemplify the double standard in place as a result of the patriarchal ideology of society; when men do it, it is not a big deal – it’s just what guys do; meaning, they are allowed to swig a cold, refreshing beer after a hard day’s work on the ice, after winning their gold medal or Stanley Cup no matter how old they are. But when women choose to conduct their celebrations in such a manner, it is unfeminine, unladylike, unconscionable and downright unacceptable. This double standard in this case and the ensuing reactions from the press and backlash from the IOC leads one to wonder what are the parameters that define acceptable behavior of female athletes? What kinds of “naughtiness” are they permitted to partake in without being frowned upon? For instance, Lindsey Vonn can pose suggestively in Sports Illustrated in a bikini (meanwhile, she is a skier, so really, being in a bikini has nothing to do with her sport) because she looks “sexy” and is selling magazines to men who can look at her picture. However, the Canadian Women’s Hockey Team is committing big taboos by drinking and smoking to celebrate their victory. Evidently, it is not just a double standard between men and women, but a double standard between female athletes determined by the “naughty” behavior in which they choose to participate; one behavior might be deemed acceptable because it is sexy and others get pleasure from it (Vonn), while others are labeled as “tacky,” “distasteful” or “irresponsible” because women are acting “too much like men” (Canadian Women’s post-game celebration).

Moreover, even at this Olympic Games, after Canadian Jon Montgomery won a gold medal in Men’s Skeleton, he walked through the streets of Whistler drinking an entire pitcher of beer. Similarly, American snowboarder Scotty Lago won a bronze medal in the halfpipe and was photographed with a woman kneeling suggestively below his waist to kiss his medal. Nobody made a fuss about these two incidents – did you hear about them at all? The lack of negative media attention about these two incidents suggests that most of the backlash against the Women’s Hockey Team had everything to do with them being women – since it is apparently socially unacceptable for women to smoke a cliché victory cigar and drink a cold beverage. I’m not saying I condone going back out on the ice and drinking in public, and the players on the team completely recognized that they did a “poor job keeping it out of the public eye. It was more of a team celebration that we kind of got caught up in, something we definitely didn’t want to get out” according to goaltender, Shannon Szabados.

The fact of the matter is that their behavior did not conform to the standards of “ladylikeness” so deeply rooted in our society’s norms and values. This article clearly depicts the double standard that exists in society – men can get away with acting one way, while women are chastised for acting in the exact same manner because it is unfeminine. It is unfortunate that women have made so much progress over the years, particularly in the field of athletics. They have so much talent and ability, yet they still are viewed as “not male” – they can have all the skill in the world, but at the end of the day, they are not men and it is not okay for them to act like it either; case in point, the post-game celebration was deemed as a “guy thing” that women should not be doing, so the negative backlash ensued. Now, it is likely that more people will now remember the gold medal game for the post-game celebrations rather than the competition itself, which is also unfortunate because it was a great game, and I’d be lying if I said part of me didn’t wish I were back home in Canada that night to celebrate in style just like the Women’s Hockey Team.