Lausanne HC and Fribourg-Gottéron played the third longest game in Swiss ice hockey history last Wednesday. Is that healthy? A doctor warns.
Jason Fuchs liberated Lausanne HC on Thursday night with his goal in the third longest game in Swiss play-off history.
Jean-Christophe Bott / Keystone
Sport thrives on its larger and smaller dramas. And it doesn’t always take blood and tears to make a match unforgettable. Sometimes a few drops of sweat are enough. And this flowed in abundance in the second play-off semi-final game on Wednesday between Lausanne HC and Fribourg-Gottéron. Until Jason Fuchs ended the game with his goal to make it 3-2 and equalize the series at 1-1 for the Vaudois.
It was already the 107th minute and the third extra time when Fuchs thrilled the Lausanne spectators who had waited in the hall. The clock already showed 0:40 a.m. on Thursday. The game started the evening before at 8 p.m. The duel between the second and third teams in the regular season continues on Saturday in Freiburg. Then we will see what condition the players are in after the marathon match.
A match full of highlights: Game 2 of the semi-final between Lausanne and Gottéron.
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Lausanne – Gottéron is the third longest game in the history of the Swiss ice hockey play-offs. The record is held by Geneva/Servette and SC Bern, who played a good ten minutes longer in March 2019 (117:43) – until American Mark Arcobello scored to make it 3-2 for the Bernese. The teams played almost two games in a row in the Les Vernets Hall.
Christian Djoos from Lausanne was on the ice for almost 51 minutes
Hardly anyone knows what this does to the players better than Martin Schär. He has been a team doctor at SC Bern since the 1991/92 season, making him one of the longest-serving doctors in Swiss ice hockey. Schär says that the players were sitting in the dressing room after the match and at times didn’t really know where they were. “They didn’t speak coherently and were sometimes fantasizing. We were lucky that we qualified for the semi-finals with the win and then had a few days off. There’s not much you can do as a doctor in such moments. The important thing is to drink, drink and drink some more. Nobody really wanted to eat back then.”
Martin Schär, team doctor SC Bern.
PD
The stress is far from being the same for all players. Lausanne’s Swedish defender Christian Djoos, for example, was on the ice for 50:53 minutes in the last semi-final match, while Gottéron’s American defender Ryan Gunderson, 38, was on the ice for 42:58 minutes. Jason Fuchs, who decided the game, managed 27:58 minutes, while Mike Hügli only managed 3:51. He probably only felt a slight lack of sleep on Thursday.
But the actual time on the ice is just part of the drama that such matches cause. After the play-off games, the players are usually so pumped with adrenaline that they lie in bed for hours afterwards and cannot fall asleep. For this reason, prescription aids are regularly used in ice hockey.
Schär says every player is different. In Bern, only a handful of players need a gentle push to calm down. “If this is necessary three or four times within several weeks during the play-offs, then from a medical point of view there is nothing wrong with it. But if it became normal, it would be worrying.”
The then Geneva captain Noah Rod once told “Blick” about the record match against Bern five years ago: “I especially remember two teams that didn’t want to play ice hockey because they were afraid of making a mistake that would ruin the game costs.” In addition to the physical strains, there are also psychological ones, which should not be underestimated. On the one hand there is pure euphoria, on the other there is profound depression.
Lausanne relief last Thursday after midnight: The Vaudois equalized the series against Gottéron at 1-1.
Jean-Christophe Bott / Keystone
In Norway, a match is entering its eighth extra time – many fans had already gone to sleep
In Switzerland, since spring 2018, play-off games with an even score are no longer decided by penalty shootouts, but continue until a goal is scored in the game. In jargon this is called “sudden death”. This rule, which like so many things in ice hockey is borrowed from the NHL, is part of the fascination that the play-offs exude.
However, the longest ice hockey game in history was not played in North America. In Norway, a match between the Storhamar Dragons and the Sparta Warriors was only decided after 214 minutes and 14 seconds, or in the eighth overtime. When the winning goal was scored, only a fraction of the initial 5,000 spectators were still in the hall. There were also clear gaps in the audience in the final phase on Thursday in Lausanne.
Marathon matches like these arouse equal amounts of enthusiasm and criticism. The league director Denis Vaucher says: “Extensions several thirds long like the one in Lausanne are part of the show. Whenever this happens, the question of meaning is asked from outside. But within the league and among the clubs, these extensions are not up for discussion, especially since they rarely last that long.
The Bern team doctor Schär sees it a little differently: “From a medical point of view, not only these endless extensions, but also the double rounds with two games within 24 hours are delicate, if not negligent. You can’t simulate games like this in advance. Concentration drops significantly during double rounds, and the risk of injury increases.
According to Schär, it is not possible to make a general assessment of how much time a well-trained ice hockey player needs to recover from such exertion. He says: “It takes longer for a 35-year-old than for a 20-year-old. Basically, ice hockey players are not trained to complete such ultra-marathons. Almost three days is definitely too short to fully recover from it. However, Lausanne HC and Fribourg-Gottéron now have to cope with this rhythm.