Kenya might be known more for producing the world’s greatest long distance runners than for winter athletes, but the country’s only ice hockey team hoped a trip to Canada would help change that narrative.
Earlier this week, the Kenya Ice Lions, who have nobody to play against back home, were featured in a heart-warming video in which Canadian coffee-and-donut chain Tim Hortons brought them to Toronto in mid-August to play their first game.
The video’s highlight came when National Hockey League stars Sidney Crosby and Nathan MacKinnon reduced the unsuspecting Ice Lions to tears as they walked into a locker room wearing the team’s green uniforms to join them for their game.
Photograph courtesy of Tim Horton / Reuters
“You know, for us this is all like a dream come true,” Ice Lions captain and founder Benard Azegere said.
The Ice Lions, based in a country too near the equator to have snow in winter, are a sort of modern-day version of the Jamaica bobsled team that went to the 1988 Olympics.
Azegere said the Ice Lions learned to play the game on a rink inside a Nairobi hotel with the help of online tutorials and a friendly group at the city’s High Commission of Canada who donated sticks and random pieces of equipment to the team.
“We didn’t have goalie equipment and nobody can take that risk to be a goalie without the proper gear,” Azegere said. “So what we used to do was we had a rubber penguin and we used to put it at the center of the goal and to score you had to hit the penguin above the belly.”
The 1,400m2 ice surface is meant for leisure skating and lacks the rounded corners of traditional hockey rinks, but it is home for the Ice Lions, who shared videos of their practices on social media in a bid to recruit players.
When the Tim Hortons chain learned about the Ice Lions, they decided to fly them to Toronto where they were given personalized jerseys, new hockey equipment and a chance to play against a recreational team made up of firefighters.
Azegere said the trip to Canada, where hockey is a national obsession, has given the team plenty of exposure in Kenya where requests are pouring in from people who want to join them.
While the Ice Lions still have no other teams to compete against at home, Azegere is hopeful more ice surfaces would be built in Kenya so that one day a proper league could be formed.
“Our intention right now... is not only to feature in a future Winter Olympics, but we have a dream of making ice hockey big in Kenya,” Azegere said. “We are known in the [sporting] world for other reasons, mainly athletics and rugby, but we are trying to go an extra mile and fly our Kenyan flag in a different way.”
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