Chinese goaltender Hong Guo makes a save during the 2002 Olympic Winter Games.
photo: IIHF Archive
You can draw a hard line in the history of women’s hockey in China since 1990. Between that first IIHF tournament and the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, the Chinese team was among the elite, twice competing for a bronze medal and remaining in the top division the entire two decades.
Between 2011 and the present day, China has been in Division I and has never made it back to the elite group.
Almost exactly concurrent with these facts are the career years of goaltender Hong Guo. She played between 1992 and 2004, appearing in all eleven Olympic Games encounters of the Chinese Women’s team in 1998 and 2002, as well as 31 of the team’s 34 Women’s Worlds games during the seven tournaments she participated in.
Guo was tall (172cm/5’8”) and athletic on her team, giving rise to her nickname “Great Wall of China.” She was without question the best player on the team and the main reason for China’s successes.
Guo made a name for herself from the get-go. She led China to a 2-1 win over Norway for 5th place in 1992, and two years later she took the team to the bronze-medal game after a 4-4 tie with Sweden and 8-1 win over the Norwegians.
In 1997, the Chinese won two more games in the preliminary round, including a 6-2 win over Russia and an 11-3 win over Switzerland. The team failed to score in its final two games, finishing 4th again.
China beat Japan and Sweden at the first Olympics with women’s hockey, in Nagano in 1998, and a modest 4-1 loss to Finland prevented Guo from earning a medal. China held a 1-0 lead after the first period in that game but couldn’t generate further offence.
These were the closest events China came to winning a medal, but Guo held the team in time and again for several more years, keeping her country in the all-important top echelon of play. She retired in 2004 at age 30 because of a bad back, and diminishing results thereafter spelled China’s doom for the 2010s and on.
But for 12 years, Hong Guo was a star in the women’s game, the first player from the Far East to generate the kind of admiration from the North Americans who would say, “she could play for us.”
Click here for the overview of stories.
Between 2011 and the present day, China has been in Division I and has never made it back to the elite group.
Almost exactly concurrent with these facts are the career years of goaltender Hong Guo. She played between 1992 and 2004, appearing in all eleven Olympic Games encounters of the Chinese Women’s team in 1998 and 2002, as well as 31 of the team’s 34 Women’s Worlds games during the seven tournaments she participated in.
Guo was tall (172cm/5’8”) and athletic on her team, giving rise to her nickname “Great Wall of China.” She was without question the best player on the team and the main reason for China’s successes.
Guo made a name for herself from the get-go. She led China to a 2-1 win over Norway for 5th place in 1992, and two years later she took the team to the bronze-medal game after a 4-4 tie with Sweden and 8-1 win over the Norwegians.
In 1997, the Chinese won two more games in the preliminary round, including a 6-2 win over Russia and an 11-3 win over Switzerland. The team failed to score in its final two games, finishing 4th again.
China beat Japan and Sweden at the first Olympics with women’s hockey, in Nagano in 1998, and a modest 4-1 loss to Finland prevented Guo from earning a medal. China held a 1-0 lead after the first period in that game but couldn’t generate further offence.
These were the closest events China came to winning a medal, but Guo held the team in time and again for several more years, keeping her country in the all-important top echelon of play. She retired in 2004 at age 30 because of a bad back, and diminishing results thereafter spelled China’s doom for the 2010s and on.
But for 12 years, Hong Guo was a star in the women’s game, the first player from the Far East to generate the kind of admiration from the North Americans who would say, “she could play for us.”
Click here for the overview of stories.