It’s been 15 years since the first time Latvia hosted the IIHF Ice Hockey World Championship, and Riga 2006 (5 to 21 May) was one of the most exciting and unforgettable tournaments in hockey history.

Following up on February’s Winter Games triumph in Turin, Sweden became the first nation ever to win both the Olympic gold medal and the World Championship gold medal in the same year. For the first time, Canada’s Sidney Crosby and Russia’s Alexander Ovechkin both showcased their skills at the same Worlds. The loud, passionate Latvian fans never stopped cheering. And those were just a few of the highlights.

As the Worlds finally return to this beautiful Baltic state in 2021, let’s explore 15 memories from Riga 2006.

1) Last hurrah for ties

Remember ties? Not the ones you wear around your neck, the “equal score after 60 minutes and one point apiece in the standings” kind. 2006 marked the last time ties occurred at an IIHF tournament. And while some people felt they were boring, those good old-fashioned deadlocks went out with a bang.

Blowing horns, banging drums, and chanting fervently, the capacity home crowd of 10,669 at the brand-new Arena Riga went wild when Latvia tied the defending champion Czechs 1-1 in their opener. Aleksejs Sirokovs – still active this season at age 40 with Olimp Riga as both an assistant captain and the GM – earned a slice of Latvian immortality when he scored the first goal at 6:22.

Arguably the most exciting pre-medal round was Russia’s 3-3 tie with Sweden. In this end-to-end duel, Jorgen Jonsson’s early second-period goal gave Tre Kronor a lead that endured until Alexei Mikhnov tallied his second goal of the night with just 4:13 remaining.

2) Brothers in arms

Riga featured some brotherly collaboration and competition, but not with the Stastnys, Sutters, or Sedins. Instead, it involved two surnames we just mentioned.

Jorgen Jonsson, a 2019 IIHF Hall of Fame inductee who retired with the all-time record for Swedish national team games (285), joined forces with Kenny Jonsson, who had been named Best Defenceman in Turin and captained Sweden with broken ribs in Riga. They, of course, became the first – and still only – pair of brothers to capture “double gold.”

Meanwhile, Russia’s Alexei Mikhnov got the rare chance to face his younger brother Andrei in a 6-0 win over Ukraine. Both forwards were born in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv. Even though Alexei finished second in goals on Russia (four), neither he nor Andrei ever played again at a top-level Worlds. In 2020-21, Alexei, 38, played his second straight year with Metallurg Zhlobin in Belarus after a long KHL career, while Andrei, 37, served as an assistant captain with Sokil Kyiv.

3) Backstrom’s beautiful beginning

When Nicklas Backstrom filled coach Bengt-Ake Gustafsson’s 25th and final roster spot, the gifted 18-year-old centre from Valbo became the youngest Swede ever to make his World Championship debut, outstripping Peter Forsberg.

Swedish GM Mats Naslund revealed that he’d been watching Backstrom ever since the Brynas phenom was 11. Before the 3-3 tie with Russia, media were not allowed to interview Backstrom, as the team wanted to keep the Swedish league’s rookie of the year focused on hockey. 

Backstrom went pointless in four games in Riga, but his senior-level IIHF career was off to a great start. He added another Worlds gold medal in 2017 and a Stanley Cup with the Washington Capitals in 2018. Could “Backy” join the Triple Gold Club at the 2022 Olympics? Stay tuned.

4) Detroit’s pain, Tre Kronor’s gain

It was a heartbreaking season in Motown. The Detroit Red Wings captured their NHL-leading fifth Presidents’ Trophy with 124 regular season points. However, the eighth-seeded Edmonton Oilers upset Detroit in six games in the Western Conference quarter-finals, exploiting the neutral zone trap and ending Wings captain Steve Yzerman’s legendary career.

Still, there was a silver lining for Sweden, which added four Wings – including three Olympic gold medalists from Turin – to its Riga roster. It’s safe to say that without them, Tre Kronor’s “double gold” wouldn’t have materialized.

Niklas Kronwall, a Wings rookie, was named tournament MVP, Best Defenceman, and an all-star team member. The hard-hitting “Kronner,” 25, led Sweden with 10 points, and remains the last defenceman to lead a World Championship gold-medal team in scoring. Mikael Samuelsson was second in team scoring (nine points), including two goals and three assists in the medal round. Henrik Zetterberg scored twice in a 4-4 tie with Switzerland, and he also had three assists. And Johan Franzen, who did not make the Turin team, chipped in three assists as well.

5) Crosby, Ovechkin put on all-star performances

When Sidney Crosby made his World Junior debut in 2004, he didn’t win the gold medal and he never faced Russia. Those two elements were repeated when the prodigious Canadian centre made his Worlds debut in Latvia. Yet both Crosby and Alexander Ovechkin – then rivals for the NHL’s Calder Memorial Trophy as rookie of the year, which “Ovi” would claim – dazzled in different ways at this tournament.

Overall, Crosby got the better of the duel. At 18, with coach Marc Habscheid’s fourth-place team, he became the youngest player ever to win the scoring title (8+8=16) and was named Best Forward. Ovechkin, playing his third Worlds at age 20, led fifth-place Russia in scoring (6+3=9). The future captains of the Pittsburgh Penguins and Washington Capitals both cracked the tournament all-star team.

These long-time archrivals wouldn’t actually face each other at the Worlds until 2015, when Crosby captained Canada to a 6-1 victory over Russia in the final.

6) More future legends shine

Truly, attending the games in Riga was a perfect way to discover the young men who would rule both NHL and IIHF play in the 2010s.

Yevgeni Malkin – a future two-time NHL scoring champ, three-time Stanley Cup winner with Pittsburgh, and two-time World Champion – got everyone buzzing in Russia’s 10-1 opening win over Kazakhstan. The 19-year-old Metallurg Magnitogorsk centre’s four-point night included a spectacular breakaway goal. Malkin leaped over lunging Kazakh goalie Roman Medvedev and whacked the puck in out of the air.

Canada’s Patrice Bergeron already owned a 2004 World Championship gold medal and 2005 World Junior gold medal when he came to the Latvian capital. Playing on Canada’s top line with Crosby and Brad Boyes, Bergeron, 20, finished second in tournament scoring (6+8=14) while delivering stellar two-way play. Of course, today his resume also includes two Olympic gold medals, a Stanley Cup with the Boston Bruins, and four Selke Trophies.

Meanwhile, even though underdog Slovenia got relegated in just its fourth all-time Worlds appearance, there was no denying Anze Kopitar’s stardom. Just 18, the big Jesenice centre, then with Sweden’s Sodertalje SK, finished ninth in tournament scoring (3+6=9). In the NHL, Kopitar led the Los Angeles Kings in playoff scoring en route to two Cups and owns two Selke Trophies.

7) A few behavioural problems

To put things nicely, nobody’s perfect.

In Riga, the players didn’t always behave. Italy’s Tony Iob and Ukraine’s Sergi Klymentiev got into a fight in the corridor of Skonto Arena, the secondary venue, after being ejected with misconducts. Iob was kicked out of the tournament with a three-game suspension, while Klymentiev got a two-game ban. However, the Ukrainian captain only served one game after his federation appealed.

The fans didn’t always behave either. In an 11-0 rout of Latvia, Canada scored a tournament-record nine power-play goals, and the partisan crowd of 8,389 grew incensed with American referee Rick Looker’s decisions. The game had to be stopped when fans littered the ice with coins, cell phones, and shoes. Veteran Latvian forward Janis Sprukts actually picked up a microphone and appealed to the crowd to restore order.

Even the ice misbehaved once. During Sweden and Switzerland’s hard-fought 4-4 tie at Skonto Arena, a big piece of ice broke loose, resulting in a delay of an hour and 15 minutes. There were no other similar mishaps on this rink, which was constructed inside a convention centre for these Worlds. And nothing was going to stop Riga’s hosting from being a smashing success, with an impressive total attendance of 331,626.

8) Big tournament for Belarus

To this day, Belarus has never topped its sixth-place finish on Latvian ice in World Championship competition. In an NHL context, ex-goalie Glen Hanlon is the answer to a trivia question, “Who allowed Wayne Gretzky’s first NHL goal on 14 October 1979?” But in Riga, Hanlon brilliantly coached the Belarusians to their first quarter-final berth ever in his second year behind their bench. 

The crucial victories were 2-1 upsets over Slovakia and Switzerland, and the man of the moment was goaltender Andrei Mezin. Best-known for backstopping Belarus to a 4-3 quarter-final shocker over Sweden in the 2002 Olympic quarter-final, the acrobatic 31-year-old had a 1.72 GAA and 94.7 save percentage in five games in 2006. Despite recording 38 saves, Mezin couldn’t save Belarus in a 3-0 quarter-final loss to Finland, but he was deservedly named to the tournament all-star team. 

9) Hannula wears white hat and black hat

During Sweden’s 6-0 quarter-final romp over the U.S., Mika Hannula was on top of the world. Playing his second Worlds after winning Olympic gold in Turin, the hard-working HV71 winger led the way with a hat trick. Yet three days later, Hannula gained a different, unwanted type of notoriety.

With the Swedes leading Canada in their semi-final, Sidney Crosby poked a loose puck through goalie Johan Holmqvist’s feet to cut the deficit to 5-3 with 35 seconds left in the second period. Hannula took exception and came steaming in with a cross-check to the Canadian superstar’s face. The 27-year-old Swede was ejected with a five-minute major and a game misconduct.

Hannula was suspended for the gold medal game versus the Czech Republic, and after further review from the IIHF’s disciplinary committee, he received a four-game ban for the 2007 Worlds and a fine of 5,000 Swiss francs. As it turned out, the second suspension was moot. Hannula never wore Swedish colours in IIHF competition again. Today, at age 42, he works with a Stockholm-based company as a personal assistant for individuals with disabilities.

10) Slovakia awarded its first Worlds

Slovakia’s eighth-place finish in Riga was underwhelming, but Slovak fans had reason to cheer when Bratislava and Kosice were chosen as the 2011 IIHF World Championship host cities at the IIHF Annual Congress.

The decision came in the first round of voting. Slovakia – whose then-president Ivan Gasparovic came to support the nomination – won with 70 votes, while the Swedish bid (Stockholm and Gothenburg) got 25 and Hungary’s 14. It was the first time in history that Slovakia would get to host the Worlds as an independent nation.

11) Finns have monster bronze medal game

Finland wasn’t only cheering for its national hockey team during the 2006 Worlds. Dressed in outrageous monster costumes, the heavy metal band Lordi made history at the Eurovision Song Contest in Athens when it ended Finland’s 45-year drought on 20 May with the winning song “Hard Rock Hallelujah.” This was a big deal for the Finns, who later renamed a city square after Lordi in their hometown of Rovaniemi.

Call it coincidence, but on 21 May, coach Erkka Westerlund’s team ate Canada alive in a 5-0 win in the bronze medal game. Goalie Frederik Norrena earned a 37-save shutout in this penalty-filled affair, which put Finland back on the Worlds podium for the first time since 2001’s silver. It remains Canada’s most lopsided defeat in a bronze medal game.

12) For Sweden, a final to remember

For Bengt-Ake Gustafsson and his men, the 4-0 gold-medal win over the Czechs in front of 9,800 fans was pure Baltic bliss. After Sweden killed off two early penalties, a faceoff in the Czech end opened the door for defenceman Jesper Mattsson to pick up the loose puck from Niklas Kronwall’s solo jaunt to the net and flip it in over goalie Milan Hnilicka at 14:36. Just 37 seconds later, Frederik Emvall tipped in Mattsson’s shot from the blue line.

The Swedes were on cruise control from there, padding their lead with second-period goals from Kronwall and Jorgen Jonsson and protecting netminder Johan Holmqvist’s shutout.

Eight returnees from the 2006 Olympic team earned the unique “double gold” distinction: Niklas Kronwall, Jorgen Jonsson, Kenny Jonsson, Henrik Zetterberg, Ronnie Sundin, Mikael Samuelsson, Mika Hannula, and Stefan Liv.

13) Kronwall adds to his treasure

Niklas Kronwall would play 953 NHL games and retire at age 38, but 2006 was the future Triple Gold Club member’s international peak. So it was befitting that Borje Salming – the highest-scoring Swedish NHL blueliner (787 career points) before Nicklas Lidstrom – came to Tre Kronor’s dressing room to congratulate “Kronner” during the Riga victory party.

The 25-year-old Stockholm native’s good fortune didn’t end there. At a golf tournament shortly afterwards, Kronwall won some scratch-and-win tickets, and ended up one million Swedish kronor (approximately $140,000 USD) richer.

14) For Czechs, a final to forget

The Czech Republic’s problem in Riga was peaking too early. Zbynek Irgl’s nifty deking of Russian goalie Maxim Sokolov delivered a thrilling 4-3 overtime win against Russia, and captain David Vyborny – a five-time World Championship gold medalist who was the lone Czech to crack the tournament all-star team – scored the late power-play winner in a 3-1 semi-final victory over Finland.

However, coach Alois Hadamczik’s team simply came out flat in the final. The Swedes stifled them the way the Czechs did Canada in Vienna in 2005 en route to a 3-0 gold-medal win. The Czechs registered a paltry 15 shots on goal and never posed a serious threat against Tre Kronor in Riga. Nonetheless, Hadamczik’s contract was extended through 2008.

15) Latvia dominates official web site

When the 2020 IIHF Ice Hockey World Championship in Switzerland was unfortunately cancelled due to the pandemic, IIHF.com staged a fun #VirtualWorlds based on fan voting. Nobody who knows international hockey was surprised that the passionate Latvian supporters voted their virtual team to victory.

Back in 2006, the official tournament site was in its seventh year of existence and Latvian fans were riding high on the information hockey superhighway. (Or was that the World Wide Puck Web?) Users in Latvia recorded nearly 50 million hits on the site, with Canada, the U.S., Russia, and Finland next in line.

IIHF.com’s audience has grown exponentially in recent years, and we’re excited about another amazing Riga tournament – on the ice and on your screens – in 2021.