The Russian Adaptive Hockey Festival is known as “Hockey Family Fest” began this week and continues through May 4. The festival includes 1000 children and youth with disabilities playing for 30 teams in para hockey, special hockey, and for the first time ever: Blind Ice Hockey divisions!
This marks the first tournament in the history of the #parasport of Blind Hockey to take place outside of North America. Congratulations to the Children’s Sledge Hockey League of Russia on their tremendous success in growing the sport over the past two years – there are now six Blind Hockey teams for children and youth across Russia as the sport continues to grow around the world!
This video from Nizhniy Novgorod, Russia where the adaptive hockey festival is taking place. The event includes more than 1000 participants from 25 Russian regions. One division in this festival is a new version of adaptive hockey: Blind Hockey. Click here to watch now!
The sport uses an adapted puck for visually impaired athletes that are bigger than a usual puck, so they can see it better, and the goalkeepers are totally blind by rule. 15 years old Ivan Zheleznov has been playing a little bit for more than two years now. He knows speed and tracks the puck by sound. He is a goalkeeper from Cheboksaky team.
Ivan: the net is not a very difficult construction with a lot of turns etc. one goal post and a second goal post. I just practice a lot and use my feelings and intuition to know the situation on the ice.
In this festival there are 3 Blind Hockey teams, all of them started to play less than two years ago. Now there are six Blind Hockey teams in Russia as this adaptive version of hockey has just started to grow.
The #parasport of Blind Ice Hockey continues to grow around the world and is now played in:
Canada
USA
England
Russia
Finland
Sweden
