Reality bites for China’s ice hockey ringers on Winter Olympic debut

As China began to organise hosting the 2022 Winter Olympics one problem started to emerge – they had automatically qualified for the ice hockey competition, yet they didn’t have a team. The solution? Phoning around to put together a squad of ringers from scratch.

And so on Thursday, when they made their debut at the Games in Beijing, facing the might of a historically successful United States team, the China roster included players like 32-year-old American-Chinese goaltender Jeremy Smith from Dearborn in Michigan, listed as Jieruimi Shimisi. Likewise, Jieke Kailiaosi is better recognised by his friends in Chicago where he was born as Jake Chelios.

More than half of the 25 players in China’s squad were born or grew up in North America. Smith told ESPN he had been surprised to get a call inviting him to join a team in Beijing that could lead to an Olympic place. “If you’re joking,” he told his agent, “I’m waiting for the punchline.”

The International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) permits players to represent a country if they have lived and played in a league there for two years, and have transferred to the new national association.

So, in order to bond them together as a team – and ensure eligibility for the Games – players were contracted to a new Chinese club. In 2016 HC Kunlun Red Star entered the Kontinental Hockey League, a mostly Russian competition that also features clubs from Belarus, Finland and Latvia among others. China itself has no professional league, and the plan was hatched to avoid Chinese embarrassment on the international stage.

They have not fared well over their six seasons, reaching the play-offs only once. In the last three years they have won fewer than 40 of their 170 matches in regulation time.