However within the males’s competitors, the Russian squad — formally competing because the Russian Olympic Committee as a penalty for the nation’s historical past of doping — was a pretournament favourite, if an imperfect one.
The Russians almost misplaced their first recreation in Beijing, a gathering with the Swiss. They later beat Denmark, which was making its inaugural Olympic look in males’s hockey, by two objectives. The Czech Republic’s crew outlasted the Russians, 6-5, to complete the preliminary spherical.
They nonetheless earned a spot within the quarterfinal spherical, the place they beat Denmark once more, after which survived a semifinal towards Sweden on Friday night time, when it took a 17-shot shootout to resolve a winner.
The Finns had a considerably smoother path to Sunday’s assembly: They pummeled Slovakia within the preliminary spherical, the place additionally they beat Latvia and edged Sweden, and eviscerated Switzerland in a quarterfinal. They extra narrowly beat the Slovak crew within the semifinal however superior with far much less of a combat than their Russian counterparts.
However it was the Russians who scored first on Sunday. Mikhail Grigorenko, a ahead who was on Russia’s gold medal-winning crew in 2018 and beforehand performed within the N.H.L., sliced a shot towards the web, the place, with virtually 13 minutes to play within the first, it streaked previous Finland’s Harri Sateri.
The Finns tied the sport early within the second, when Ville Pokka, a Finnish defenseman, took a shot from the rink’s edge, proper in entrance of his personal bench and simply yards forward of the blue line. The puck zipped previous a Finn, a Russian and Ivan Fedotov, the 25-year-old netminder who was born in Finland however reared in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Fedotov opened the third interval with extra distress: Simply 31 seconds in, Hannes Bjorninen redeemed an earlier penalty field stint by taking a straight-on shot on the Russian web.
