Friday, February 22, 2002
Papers hard on stunned Swedes
By STEVE BUFFERY -- Toronto Sun
SALT LAKE CITY -- "We are nasty when it comes to writing about hockey," Swedish Expressen columnist Mats Olsson said. "But not as nasty as The Toronto Sun."
A backhanded compliment.
Olsson was tipping his hat to Toronto's tabloid newspaper for the job we do covering hockey, the good and the bad.
But the Expressen, one of the leading newspapers in Sweden, reached new, uh, heights in nastiness yesterday in reporting Sweden's huge 4-3 upset loss to Belarus on Wednesday.
From the front page of the newspaper to the last sports page, there is extensive coverage of what Swedish fans are calling the "Darkest day in Swedish sports history."
When Peter Forsberg scored on Canadian goaltender Corey Hirsch in a shootout at the 1994 Lillehammer Games to win the Olympic hockey gold, the Swedish government issued a stamp of the play from a photograph.
The Expressen made its own stamp for the front page yesterday -- from a photo of the game-winning shot bouncing off goaltender Tommy Salo, with the name Belarus written on top in Russian script.
On another page are head shots of every Swedish player with their professional salaries written underneath. The headline reads: "Guilty. They betrayed their country."
And it goes on and on. The headline on another page reads: "Det har ar en skandal" (This is a scandal). A quote taken from Markus Naslund, the captain of the Vancouver Canucks. There are also photos and stories about the team and Mats Sundin, the captain of both the Swedish team and the Toronto Maple Leafs.
"We received over 200 e-mails right after the game and 200 more this morning," Olsson said.
And they weren't e-mails of condolence.
"People were saying that they should take their passports away and never let them in the country again, things like that," he said.
Dagens Nyheter sports reporter Conny Thelenius wrote that Vladimir Kopat of Belarus, who scored the winning goal, "belongs forever to Swedish sports history." "It was he who shot Salo in the head and created the headline 'The fiasco of all times' in the sports pages."
National hockey federation chief Richard Fagerlund said his e-mail account was overflowing with angry notes from Swedes and he understood their despair.
He said the only explanation was that the Swedes had underestimated the Belarusians.
-- with files from AP
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2002 Games Men's Hockey Coverage
