MILAN, Feb 2 (Reuters) - Women's ice hockey can reach a new pinnacle at this month's Milano Cortina Games, with a popular pro league booming in North America ready to capitalise on the Olympic momentum.
A famously bitter rivalry between powerhouse nations Canada and the United States has helped build women's ice hockey into one of the Games' most popular events since its 1998 debut.
But when the stadiums cleared every four years, players faced an uncertain - and at some points non-existent - professional
pathway, cutting short the momentum they built on the Olympic stage.
"I was at the peak of my career and we didn't know where to play," said Angela Ruggiero, an on-air analyst for NBC who won Olympic gold with the U.S. in 1998.
"We were playing exhibition games. We were training on our own."
After her fourth and final Games in 2010, little progress was made. "Fans were excited and then there was no league and there wasn't even a post-Olympic tour," she said.
'VASTLY DIFFERENT'
The scene could scarcely be more different this time around, with women's sport enjoying unprecedented growth around the world and the Professional Women's Hockey League, which launched in 2024, picking back up days after the closing ceremony.
"It's really taken off in popularity - not just grassroots and participation - but on the business side," said Ruggiero. "It's not just the exposure you get once every four years at the Olympics, it's year-round now."
The PWHL accounts for about 60 of the athletes competing in Milan, represented on six of the seven European teams in the tournament, in addition to the U.S. and Canada squads.
The league expanded from six to eight teams this season and broke the record for the highest-attended in-arena game in U.S. women's hockey history in January, when 17,228 fans piled into Capital One Arena in Washington, D.C., for a game between the Montreal Victoire and New York Sirens.
"The landscape of women's hockey has been vastly different at all different points of my Olympic experiences," said Kendall Coyne Schofield, who will compete in her fourth Games.
She joined her teammates in a threatened boycott over wages and benefits ahead of the 2017 World Championship and brought new fans to her sport with a breakout performance in the fastest skater event at the 2019 NHL All-Star skills competition.
She was the first woman to compete in an NHL All-Star event.
"(The boycott in 2017) really, I think, kick-started a lot of things. And then 2019, the fastest skater competition happened and then it was like, 'Where do you play?' and it was like, 'That's a great question'," Coyne Schofield told Reuters at the most recent Women's Sports Foundation gala.
She helped negotiate a collective bargaining agreement less than six months before the PWHL's first game, having become one of her sport's most recognisable figures before hoisting the title trophy in the league's first championship.
"You see new pinnacles of the sport - it's not looking forward to the Olympics every four years. I have my pro season too, that I'm equally excited about and equally as motivated to win," she said.
"That opportunity should have been there for years and years."
'PART-TIME JOB'
The opportunity was born out of frustration, after several once-promising leagues folded or lost players disillusioned with playing conditions and pay.
"This is something that shouldn't be a part-time job, which it felt like, previously," said Lauren Anderson, Director of the Warsaw Sports Business Center at the University of Oregon.
Anderson pointed to the availability of the PWHL games across traditional and streaming platforms, including YouTube, as key to building the league's success.
"(Milano Cortina is) going to do what most Olympics do, which is put the foot on the gas, and it's going to create a lot of interest," Anderson told Reuters.
Caroline Harvey, who won silver as the youngest member of the U.S. team four years ago in Beijing, said the PWHL can end "a misconception" that women's ice hockey is purely the domain of the Games.
"Little girls now can look up and be like, 'I want to be a pro hockey player'," she said.
(Reporting by Amy Tennery in Milan, additional reporting by Trevor Stynes and Daniel Fastenberg; Editing by Ken Ferris)
