It’s Canada’s national sport, but more importantly a national passion. Hockey is often used to define what it means to be Canadian. Like many Canadians, Dr. Kristi Allain, was born to be a hockey fan.

“My love of winter sports comes from my mother. She loved all sports but hockey was really her passion,” says Allain, Canada Research Chair in Physical Culture and Social Life, professor in the Department of Sociology at St. Thomas University, and leading expert on masculinity in sport.

“I grew up in Peterborough, Ontario, where hockey is a religion. When I was young, my parents had season tickets to the Ontario Hockey League Peterborough Petes games,” she adds.

“When I was getting ready to leave for university, our family started billeting a Pete’s player from Russia. It gave me a whole new perspective on hockey. I think that paired with my family’s love for the sport, this set me on a lifelong path to study hockey’s impact on Canadians.”

From the arena to academia

In Allain’s early research days, she looked at the experiences of international youth who sign contracts and play in the Canadian Hockey League. That work led her to a career in exploring the relationships between sport and national identity. She is particularly interested in the ways that sport places some Canadians at the centre of the nation while marginalizing others.

“I studied how we celebrate as a nation through the masculinity of elite-level men’s hockey,” explains Allain. “Hockey is often a space where we celebrate young, able-bodied, usually straight, often aggressive, and typically settler white men. The media focuses on promoting that image. When we only see these fit young men playing these sports, it profoundly affects us all. It tells us who really matters, whose voices matter, what types of bodies matter and, ultimately, how the Canadian identity is defined through sport.”

It’s not just hockey. Allain says the image of curling changed to “Buff Boys with Brooms” (PDF Document, 276Kb) when Team Canada with skip Brad Jacobs won the Gold Medal at the 2014 Sochi Olympics. “For decades curling was the only game where you would turn on the TV and see older people being celebrated doing a national sport. When Brad Jacobs’ team won, the media celebrated them as a new youthful, fit, vibrant, rough and tough masculinity. All the messaging around curling after 2014 shifted to youthful images of curlers. That had a direct impact on older, recently retired, Canadians from taking up the sport. They told us anecdotally that they felt they just didn’t fit in.”

‘Old-Timers’ with a fresh perspective

Allain wanted to take that research further and felt older hockey players and curlers had a valuable perspective. Through her Canada Research Chair program, Allain’s research focuses on the intersection between winter sports, masculinity and aging and how it shapes national identity and gender. Through her studies Aging and Winter Sport and The Curling Project, she spent five years speaking with older men who play hockey and curl about their experiences relating to masculinity and active aging.

“What we found were really beautiful stories about what goes on in the hockey and curling rinks and how older men create these safe spaces to truly age,” explains Allain. “We found older people create a safe space for people with physical disabilities and cognitive impairments like Alzheimer’s disease. We heard stories about hockey players helping other athletes get dressed when they needed the help. We saw a decrease in competition, aggression on the ice, sexism and racism, and an increase in inclusivity in later-life sport.”

Allain says these studies come at a time when Canada faces a tipping point in hockey after Hockey Canada faced criticism for its handling of sexual assault allegations against five members of the 2018 World Junior hockey team. Allain hopes her findings address the gaps in academic literature related to gender, aging, national identity and sport while forcing a change in policy at the professional and amateur levels.

“I think what we learned from these older men is that youthful sporting masculinity, which is often tied to all kinds of disturbing issues like violence, sexual abuse and misogyny, isn’t static over a lifetime but changes quite a bit in later life. We also learned that masculinity isn’t something that boys are just ‘born with’; it’s a social phenomenon and a result of their environment,” adds Allain. “We can use lessons from these old-timer men’s leagues to think about how we can restructure hockey organizations, in terms of who is coaching and running programs, at the local and national levels. If we do that, we can design Canadian sports to be much more inclusive.”

Allain believes none of this is possible without the buy-in of the Canadian media, who she says inform the narrative when it comes to sports. “Sports channels and sports reporters create a market and they create enthusiasm. We have finally seen an example of that with the long overdue televising of women’s hockey. Women’s hockey isn’t new, it’s been around for a long time, and the media is just now starting to promote it. We now see more female play-by-play and colour commentators and because of that we’re seeing more women in high-profile coaching and executive positions. We need more of that. The media helps tell powerful narratives about how important sport is to Canadian identity, so we need these stories of all bodies and genders and ages to be told and to reflect all kinds of Canadians, not just young men.”

Taking the show on the road

Allain and her team of fellow scholars, graduate and undergraduate students, have used their interviews with the older athletes to create a stage performance. The play called, A Winter’s Tale: Sport, Aging & Intergenerational Theatre, features community members, most of whom have never acted before, who are over 65 years old and under 25 years old, all playing seniors on stage. The research team was looking to explore what happens when older people and young people play together and what lessons can be learned.

“What we witnessed were these amazing connections between these two groups that otherwise would never have come together. They created friendships by hanging out and doing physical activities together. They learned about aging and helped each other through technical issues. Their unexpected friendships are so strong the group is planning a pool party this summer,” says Allain.

The lack of inclusivity in sport isn’t just a Canadian problem but is replicated in countries around the world. In the next phase of her research through her Canada Research Chair, Allain and her team of researchers plan to take their stage show, A Winter’s Tale, on the road to universities across Canada and parts of Europe, including Germany and Austria, in hopes of helping other scholars strategize ways to host intergenerational projects of their own.

“I think our performance work can have an impact in the real world. What if we took what we learned in the play and applied it to hockey or curling? What if we had young athletes and older athletes together on the ice? What lessons could be learned? What if we focused on older athletes as role models and teaching the next generation of curlers and hockey players how to play and what it means to be inclusive? We think our research could be very valuable in engaging communities.”

End goal

Allain plans to expand her research outside of the rink and explore the physical culture and intergenerational relationships in places like martial arts clubs, tango and salsa studios.

“By asking the critical questions like what do we want our national symbols to represent? How can we create a diverse space that captures all ages, body types and backgrounds? I think then we have hope for not only hockey and curling futures we can be proud of, but we’ll see more inclusivity in all Canadian sports.”