Kyrgyz Hockey Championships

Hockey in the country of Kyrgyzstan is not something I've given a tremendous amount of thought to, but the same day that I finished Dave Bidini's book about the game in faraway lands "Tropic of Hockey" (which I wrote about on this blog), I came across a picture in Sports Illustrated of the 2009 Kyrgyz Hockey Championships.

If that's not reason enough to go searching on the world wide interweb superhighway information place, I don't know what would be.

So... I first landed on a "The Azamat Report" blog post which featured images from the 2008 Krygyz Hockey Championships and linked to a LiveJournal blog from "Morrire" that was the source of said images.

A few of those are shown below and to view the rest, simply click on the above link to Morrire's LiveJournal blog entry.


Pregame Ceremony:





Going out for warmups. Note the goalie pads... and especially the mask.





Game on.





Well, of course they have rink signage. It's the National Championships.






Awesome stuff. Guess this relates closely to what Bidini wrote about with hockey being hockey wherever played, but the images don't look that different than those I posted from the U.S. Pond Hockey Championships.