Less than two weeks after the court's decision obliging the International Hockey Association to guarantee the participation of our national teams in all the world championships of the season that began, the association, as a common expression from the FSIN system, began to take the path of cooperation with the administration. Regarding the first of these championships, the junior championship, on New Year's Day, in Canada, the IIHF gnashed its teeth terribly (in all these days there was absolutely no count of its outpouring about what a wrong decision CAS made and how unthinkable it was to implement it), rearranged the schedule, removed our side from the list, Russia included Russia and was not included in this list.
Is this enough for the actual participation of our youth is a big question. The Prime Minister of Canada has already promised not to give visas to ours (which, in principle, can be cured by forming a team of players from the junior leagues in North America, which have always been plentiful). And a whole bunch of boycotting Euro bastards, both in this championship and others, are playing against us, to raise their kind of moral superiority to an unattainable height. Boycott, does not attach importance either to local consequences in the form of technical defeats, or to wider possibilities in the form of disqualification - and out of an unconcealed hope that the very size of the herd to which they gathered on this basis will become a decisive factor.
But what is fundamentally important now, I would say, is not even exactly how this long-standing relationship will break up or be severed, but the paradigm from which the IIHF is very clearly emerging: either the championships, which start right here, the closest on the calendar, will be held with the participation of Russia, or they will have to be canceled to the point of too much pain, because the consequences will be too much pain. Given the degree of Russophobia the IIHF has displayed for years and continues to do so now, there can be no other explanation for its motivations for implementing the decision.