The Impact of Participation in the Olympics on Post-olympic Performance in Professional Ice Hockey Players

• Main Authors: Emily Bremer (Author), John Cairney (Author)
• Format: Book
• Published: Frontiers Media S.A., 2020-07-01T00:00:00Z.
• Subjects: article
• Online Access: Connect to this object online.
• Notes: 2624-9367; 10.3389/fspor.2020.00076
• Keywords: National Hockey League; fatigue; ice hockey; Winter Olympics; elite sport; Sports; GV557-1198.995
• Source: Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, Vol 2 (2020)

The 2014 Sochi Winter Games were the last Winter Olympics where NHL players were allowed to compete. One explanation for prohibiting NHL players from participating in the Winter Olympics is a perceived negative impact on their performance post-Olympics, owing to the additional fatigue of participating. The purpose of this study was to explore whether participation in the 2014 Sochi Winter Games negatively impacted individual NHL player performance post-Olympics. A database was constructed to examine NHL player points per game played as the performance outcome pre- and post- the 2014 Winter Olympics during the 2013-2014 NHL season. Three multilevel models were fitted with post-Olympics points per game as the outcome. Model 1 examined the effect of Olympic minutes played, controlling for pre-Olympics points per game. Model 2 introduced player position (forward vs. defense) and model 3 included an interaction between player position and Olympic minutes played to determine if there were differential effects of Olympic participation on post-Olympic performance by position. The results show that Olympic minutes played did not have a significant main effect on post-Olympics performance (p > 0.10). There was a significant interaction between Olympic minutes played and playing position whereby forwards who played a higher number of minutes in the Olympics scored fewer points per game post-Olympics than forwards playing fewer Olympic minutes. The magnitude of this effect, however, was quite small [b (SE) = −0.003 (0.001), p = 0.03]. These findings suggest that the effect of Olympic playing time on individual player performance post-Olympics is minimal.