Skien 2024: All you need to know as puck drops at B-Pool Worlds in Norway

The puck will drop on Monday (15 April) at the World Para Ice Hockey Championships B-Pool in Skien, Norway, where six teams will compete in hopes of advancing to the A-Pool for the next season.

The Norwegian Ice Hockey Association will host the 10th edition of the event, with national teams from Norway, Germany, Sweden, Kazakhstan, Great Britain, and France all going for gold.

The tournament consists of round-robin games with the top two finishers advancing to the A-Pool for the following season, while the lowest finisher will be relegated to the C-Pool.

You can follow all the action live on the World Para Ice Hockey website and Facebook page, and also on the Paralympics YouTube channel.

The event will take place at Skien Fritidspark, a multi-purpose stadium originally built in 1968 and redone in 2008 with indoor sports halls, an ice hockey rink, a large water park, and several outdoor sports facilities. It is famous for hosting the 1975 European Gymnastics Championships where Romania’s Olympic legend Nadia Comaneci had her international breakthrough.

Top-seeded hosts

Norway will be the top seed as the host nation after finishing in seventh place at the last World Championships A-Pool, This will mark the first time Norway plays in the B-Pool tournament, and it will do so aiming to course correct and vault itself back to the A-Pool to keep its hopes alive of making the Milano Cortina 2026 Games.

In 2022, Norway failed to make the Winter Paralympics for the first time in history since the sport was added to the Games programme in 1994. Norway has a long history in hosting major Para ice hockey events, including the 1994 Paralympic Winter Games in Lillehammer and the 2012 World Championships A-Pool in Hamar. 

Germany will be the second seed after finishing eighth at the World Championships A-Pool last year. In four appearances in the B-Pool, Germany has medalled in three of them, including the title win in 2013. Germany’s lone appearance at the Paralympic Winter Games was in 2006.

Sweden, where the sport of Para ice hockey was founded in the 1960s, as the No. 3 seed will be looking for its first B-Pool tournament victory, having won silver three times at the event previously and bronze twice.

Kazakhstan, seeded fourth, hosted the last World Championships B-Pool in 2023, finishing fourth place with two victories in five games. In 2022, four years after starting a programme with the help of equipment from the International Paralympic Committee (IPC)’s Agitos Foundation, the nation claimed the silver medal at the World Championships C-Pool.

Great Britain, entering as the fifth seed, will aim for a top-two finish as it tries to get back to the A-Pool for the first time in 20 years. Great Britain was fifth at the last B-Pool event in 2023. This year’s squad will include five women who previously helped Great Britain to fourth place finish at the Women’s World Challenge. 

France will make its debut at the B-Pool World Championships as the No. 6 seed after winning the bronze medal at the last C-Pool event in 2022. Supported by the French Ice Hockey Federation, the programme has been rapidly building ever since hosting a “Discovery of Para Ice Hockey” event in April 2021.

The tournament will begin with Germany facing Great Britain at 11:00 local time on Monday, followed by Sweden vs. Kazakhstan at 15:00 and France vs. Norway at 19:00. Teams will play three consecutive days of round-robin games before having a day off, and then will return to the ice for two more days of games.