In 1908, the International Ice Hockey Federation, an international organization that still runs most of the international hockey tournaments today, was established. In Slovakia (as a part of former Czechoslovakia), Canadian-styled ice hockey was popularized during the European Championships in High Tatras in 1925.
In 1929 the first official tournament took place in Slovakia. The Tatra Cup is the second oldest tournament in Europe, after the Spengler Cup in Switzerland. The first organization of Slovak ice hockey was established under the name of Slovenská župa kanadského ľadového hokeja as a part of the Slovak Ice Hockey Federation in what was then Czechoslovakia.
The first organized competition was held in 1930.
Throughout the course of ice hockey history in Czechoslovakia, many Slovak players became eligible to play for the Czechoslovakian national team. Among those who were able achieve this was Ladislav Troják; A native of Košice who left for Prague to play for the LTC Praha – at those times considered to be the best ice hockey team in the country—in 1934. From there he was only a step away from playing for the national team.
Czechoslovakia and its successor states are rated as being among the leading nations on the international scene, thanks to their triumphs in the Winter Olympic Games and the World Championships.
However, the Slovak national team had to face a difficult challenge in 1993 after the dissolution of Czechoslovakia. According to the IIHF regulations it had to compete with countries with little or no ice hockey tradition at all to prove being worthy to compete at the highest level. Within only a few years of independent existence as a young nation it would mark its biggest triumph ever by winning the world championships in Sweden in 2002.
Famous quotes containing the words history of, history and/or ice:
“The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and the moral nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“If you look at history you’ll find that no state has been so plagued by its rulers as when power has fallen into the hands of some dabbler in philosophy or literary addict.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)
“I also heard the whooping of the ice in the pond, my great bed-fellow in that part of Concord, as if it were restless in its bed and would fain turn over, were troubled with flatulency and bad dreams; or I was waked by the cracking of the ground by the frost, as if some one had driven a team against my door, and in the morning would find a crack in the earth a quarter of a mile long and a third of an inch wide.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)