By Amy Tennery
MILAN, Feb 3 (Reuters) - U.S. captain Hilary Knight said players must be willing to adapt to shorter playing surfaces at the Milano Cortina Games, with the women's ice hockey tournament set to begin on Thursday.
The men's and women's tournaments were expected to take place on surfaces measuring 200 feet (60.96 metres) by 85 feet (25.91 metres), in accordance with NHL standards, as the league permits its star players to compete in the Games for the first time since 2014.
But the sport's
global governing body IIHF confirmed in December that players would play on ice measuring 196.85 feet (60 m) by 85.3 feet (26 m) at both the Milano Rho Ice Hockey Arena and Milano Santagiulia Ice Hockey Arena.
"You can tell when everything's a little different when you're used to a certain set up," said Knight, who plays for the Seattle Torrent in the Professional Women's Hockey League, which also uses NHL-standard playing surfaces.
"But we're at the Olympics, you've got to make it work."
The IIHF moved to quell concerns in December, as fans feared the shorter surfaces would impact play, saying that the differences in rink specifications were insignificant.
Organisers have scrambled to finish the Santagiulia arena, a built-from-scratch facility that is set to host the top matches in Milan.
Santagiulia was tested only as recently as January, when the opening game of the test event was stopped briefly after a hole in the ice had to be repaired.
There is no one on the U.S. team more battle-tested to the idiosyncrasies of Olympic competition than Knight -- the future Hall of Famer will become the first ice hockey player from the United States to compete in five Olympic Games in Milan.
She helped the United States to gold in 2018 and is hungry for revenge after old rivals Canada beat them in the Olympic final four years ago.
"Ice is always going to be different wherever you travel - the ice in Seattle is different than when we go out to Boston, that's just what it is," she told reporters after a confidence-boosting practice session with her teammates on Tuesday.
"Understanding that the Olympics is a massive event that kind of pops up for a very finite amount of time, there's going to be different challenges you have to overcome.
"So whether the ice is perfect or not, we're here, we're ready to play."
(Reporting by Amy Tennery in Milan, additional reporting by Giulio Piovaccari, editing by Ed Osmond)
