The world’s governing physique of ice hockey is ensuring all of its gamers are going to be protected.
On Monday, the Worldwide Ice Hockey Federation introduced that neck safety might be required to be worn throughout all sanctioned competitions.
The IIHF Council got here to the choice following suggestion from its medical committee.
The transfer comes simply two days after the group dominated that every one gamers competing within the World Junior Hockey Championships and Below-18 World Championships could be required to put on neck safety.
Now, gamers competing within the senior males’s and girls’s tournaments must put on gear suited to guard from neck lacerations.
In a launch, the IIHF says the precise date that the mandate will go into impact for the senior divisions might be primarily based on the availability of the tools. The governing physique says it’s in shut contact with suppliers, ensuring they’re able to producing for the extreme demand coming for the gear with the current sanctions.
The IIHF additionally said that till the rule is absolutely in impact, it continues to strongly encourage neck safety to be worn by its gamers competing in IIHF competitors.
The boys’s senior match in Prague and Ostrava, Czechia, doesn’t begin till Might 10, whereas the Ladies’s Worlds will get underway on April 3 in Utica, N.Y.
The rise in concern for the specialised tools comes within the aftermath of an incident the place former Pittsburgh Penguin Adam Johnson died after his neck was reduce by a skate blade in an Elite Ice Hockey League recreation in late October.
Put together to see quite a lot of neck guards being worn at numerous ranges of the Males’s Below-20 World Championships, with tournaments within the decrease divisions starting subsequent week in Hungary, Slovenia and Nice Britain, previous to the World Juniors’ first recreation in Gothenburg, Sweden on Boxing Day.
The entire Ladies’s Below-18 world competitors is ready to start in a month, together with the highest division beginning play on Jan. 6 in Zug, Switzerland.
