Prime Minister Mark Carney said Tuesday that Russia will not participate in the 2027 World Junior Championship on Canadian soil, temporarily putting to rest a boycott led by six European hockey federations that refused to face Russia.
“Russia and Belarus are supporting this illegal and unjustified horrific war in Ukraine,” Carney said in Antigua at the Commonwealth Summit. “As long as that’s going on, there will be none of those athletes competing for their countries in Canada. So if you’re asking specifically about the world juniors, the Russians will not be there.”
Carney’s comments came on the heels of the International Ice Hockey Federation’s executive council tabling deliberations for at least two more days as the sport’s governing body attempts to wrap its arms around how to implement a legally binding requirement to reinstate Russian teams to world tournament competition.
The Council of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) ruled last week that Russia must be reinstated beginning with the 2027 World Junior Championship, which is slated to be hosted in Edmonton and Red Deer, Alta., in just 53 days.
Six European federations, including hockey powers Sweden, Finland and Czechia, responded by issuing statements indicating they would not face Russian teams. The story mushroomed when future world junior hosts in Turku, Finland, and Dusseldorf and Mannheim, Germany — the co-hosts of the 2027 World Championship — threatened to pull up stakes while tournament sponsors and partners threatened to withdraw support if Russia was included.
But it was always going to be up to the individual host nations to determine whether or not they’d be willing to grant travel visas to Russian citizens in order to compete in the tournament.
“We have been waiting for governments to weigh in at the larger level, because that will ultimately govern how these tournaments are run,” one executive council member told Sportsnet. “We rely on our OPCs (Olympic Programme Commission) to communicate directly with the government but some of the smaller hockey federations have a more direct line to their OPC and government and things happen a little bit faster.”
When reached Tuesday in Switzerland prior to Carney’s definitive statement, spokesperson Kristoffer Holm told Sportsnet that the IIHF did not have any additional information or comments to share, but expected developments later in the week.
Carney’s statement appeared to get the IIHF off the hook for now, as they are obligated to implement the ruling from CAS, despite the IIHF’s own objections and “disappointment.” It also backs the previous strong statements by Hockey Canada and Adam van Koeverden, the Canadian Secretary of State for Sport, over the last week.
Over the four days since CAS released the ruling, the IIHF and its member federations were spinning their wheels on how to combat a seeming inevitability that Russia would return to the ice in Edmonton and then four additional major international tournaments in both men’s and women’s divisions.
The IIHF was wrestling with whether to contract the upcoming world juniors by one team or to add an additional qualifier to balance the tournament schedule. They were weighing safety concerns for both players and spectators. And they were navigating the IIHF bylaws and statutes to examine what would happen if the European federations did boycott and refuse to face Russia, including how potentially forfeiting games might impact the tournament and the eventualities of when/if Russia advanced to the quarterfinal or knockout round.
It’s potentially as simple as: no visa, no entry, no Russian players.
That may present a blueprint for future tournament hosts to follow, if they so choose, even if it does not solve the larger question of how sport as a whole and the hockey community wrestle with when — or if — Russia should return to future competition.