Ice Hockey in India: The past & the present | More sports News

The scenic views anywhere you travel within Ladakh immediately catch your attention. You mention Ladakh, and what comes to mind is snow-tipped mountains, captivating landscapes and monasteries. But what took Timesofindia.com to this beautiful part of India was something else, and that’s ice hockey.

The footsteps of ice hockey in Ladakh can be tracked to as far back as 1970s, with the sport initially restricted largely to the army officers deployed in the region. But once players from strong ice hockey nations started coming to Ladakh for high-altitude training, the locals also started taking the sport more seriously.
“After the year 2000, once the Indo-Canadian Cup started, the atmosphere and people’s interest in the sport grew,” said Tundup Namgyal, former captain of the Indian men’s team. “Anyone who gathered even little knowledge about the sport started jumping into it.”

But with no proper facilities for ice hockey, all that was available to the local population of Ladakh as playing surfaces was the frozen ponds and lakes in winters.
And it all started at Karzoo.
“Karzoo is very famous, not just locally but also internationally (among players who visit from abroad). Most players who have gone on to represent India have at some point played and learned the sport here,” said Namgyal.

Karzoo is actually an agricultural pond, encircled by buildings housing government offices, including the residence of the Lieutenant Governor of Ladakh. In winters, the local players fill it with water, which then freezes in extremely cold temperatures starting November-December and turns into a solid surface for ice hockey practice and even tournaments.
“Karzoo can be called the mother of ice hockey here,” Namgyal said with a sense of pride.
In Ladakh, the skating culture actually started when the local population started using the frozen ponds and lakes in winters to skate for fun, until they grew up to know about ice skating, and eventually ice hockey. Some of those who could afford it, they ordered blades from Chandigarh and attached it to sole of the army shoes. So in winters they would use it to skate and in summers as normal shoes.
The locals then picked up ice hockey from the army officials and the foreigners visiting Ladakh. They initially started playing with the normal field hockey sticks. For the puck, they first used a round ball and later, when they learned that it needs to be a flat object, they switched to the shoe-polish boxes that resemble a puck. They would fill it with sand to add weight and then use it as a puck to play.

(Photo: @lwihf Instagram)
Before Ladakh bifurcated from Jammu & Kashmir and got the status of a union terrirtory in 2019, athletes from the region struggled to leave a mark. But things on the sporting front have looked up over the last three years.
“Earlier, we (Ladakh) were just one district in Jammu & Kashmir state. But after becoming a Union Territory, sports in general got a good push from the UT administration, and ice hockey in particular,” said Moses Kunzang, Joint Director, Sports.
The growing interest locally and an Indian men’s team in place, the ice hockey fraternity started dreaming of having an all-weather Olympic-size rink to train through the year, instead of just 2-3 months during the winters.
But that looked a pretty distant dream. From equipment to funds needed for travel, it was a continued struggle, forcing players to borrow gears or resort to crowdfunding. After the men, it was the turn of women players to face the same.

“I think we have seen our share of challenges when it comes to funding, gears, for everything,” said Noor Jahan, the Indian women’s team goaltender, who is an art conservationist by profession. “It’s not a mainstream sport (yet in India). It’s a sport that is developing in the country at the moment.
“So there is going to be this challenge. It was a huge challenge in the beginning, but I see it reducing now,” she added.
What Noor meant was that the things around ice hockey for women are a little better than the days when they had to use the oversize equipment after borrowing it from the men, who were more resourceful having played the game at a higher level. And it has further improved for women since the local girls came together to institute the Ladakh Women Ice Hockey Foundation.
But as Timesofindia.com witnessed during its visit to Leh, things are changing, to the extent that two new all-weather Olympic size ice-hockey rinks are coming up in Leh & Kargil, and a delegation from International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) also visited Ladkah to inspect the site in Leh and provide their inputs.
Aivaz Omorkanov — Vice President, Asia-Oceania Region, for the IIHF — did an extensive review and inspection of the area, along with Harald Springfeld, IIHF Sport Development Manager for Asia and Oceania.

(Photo: Times Internet)
“We gave some inputs from the IIHF side, which can be implemented at this stage of the project,” said Omorkanov. “At the same time, we met the Lieutenant Governor of Ladakh, together with the Sports Secretary. We had some productive discussions and are looking forward to great cooperation between all the sports entities here in Ladakh and, of course, in India overall.”
The Lieutenant Governor of Ladakh, BD Mishra, along with the Sports Secretary, Ravinder Kumar, is spearheading the project and met the IIHF delegation, who had been invited by Royal Enfield (supporting ice hockey in Ladakh as part of the company’s CSR initiatives) via the Ice Hockey Association of India to review the blueprint as well as the site in Leh and give their inputs.
Royal Enfield have been commissioned by UT Ladakh to prepare the blueprint for ice hockey.
“All our ice hockey players have an old demand for an all-weather ice hockey indoor rink. Since Ladakh became a UT, we have taken this project under our wings. Work is in progress in both Leh and Kargil to build indoor rinks.”
As a specialist to oversee this work, former IIHF Sports Director Dave Fitzpatrick has been roped in as a consultant.
“My role in the project is to add an ice hockey component to all of this. The blueprint will come out as a plan leading into the future…You need to know what we have currently. That’s been the first phase of this project,” said Fitzpartrick.
“The first working draft is over a hundred pages right now and we are moving along quite nicely. It’s not finished yet, we still have some more information from this site visit to add to it,” he said.

(Photo: @lwihf Instagram)
The Ice Hockey Association of Ladakh (IHAL) and the Ladakh Winter Sports Club have also played a key role in lifting the status of the game in the region
“There are about 30 clubs who are affiliated to us. Now we are at a good stage,” says the IHAL president Namgial Gyapo. “About 90 percent of the players who played for the Indian men’s and women’s teams are from Ladakh.”
The sport will receive a major shot in the arm once the Sports Ministry approves the Ice Hockey Association of India as a national sports federation.
“It will definitely help if they get recognition,” says Ladakh’s Joint Sports Director, Kunzang. “They will get more funding by being a proper federation, like there are for the other sports in the country”.
The most significant part of knowing Ladakh in the context of ice hockey is that even in the most trying circumstances, the locals and those involved with the sport take a lot of pride in their association with it.
“We were invited by UT Ladakh to help them put together a blueprint for developing ice hockey, and our endeavour has really been to work with the Himalayan communities to see how can we develop the sport,” says Bidisha Dey, Executive Director, Eicher Group Foundation, which is Royal Enfield’s CSR and sustainability arm.
“Apart from government support, if we want to develop any sport, then CSR plays an important role in that. Ever since we have collaborated with Royal Enfield, we have taken the game to a different level,” said Sports Secretary, Kumar.
While all that is critical for the growth of the sport and to become technologically efficient in terms of infrastructure to spread it to other parts of India, where Ladakh stands out is the way the game is loved and unites the small population there.
That love has kept the sport alive and kicking.