Quote:
Originally Posted by undercoverbrother
I agree it is not big in Canada, but on a world stage it is big.
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Finland is traditionally a big track & field country and I didn't notice, but yeah, it's one of the bigger sporting events in the world... sort of.
The problem with that claim is that the audiences are highly inflated by the huge number of countries participating The number of people who actually care is kind of debatable. I think it's telling that finding proper TV audience numbers for the event seems to be difficult.
In any case, it's not in the same ballpark than the olympics either in size, in audiences or symbolism.
Btw, for good measure the 2014 IIHF championships are held in Belarus, which for those who don't know has been a dictatorship for some time now. And yeah, there have been quite a few protests in Europe and calls to move them because of the human rights situation.
The IIHF has however taken a slightly different stance to the IOC; they actually have made veiled threats to Belarus about moving the competitions, and while it's hard to say if it has done any good, if nothing else it does seem that Belarus has avoided drawing attention to itself. (Which granted has been made easier by a pretty intense year and a half of news.)