Yifeng Shen and Zhidong Wang lead China to historic bronze on home soil

The penultimate day of the Para ice hockey tournament at the Beijing 2022 Paralympic Winter Games was reserved for a bronze-medal game that saw history being made at the National Indoor Stadium on Saturday (12 March).

China took on its Asian rivals South Korea and won by 4-0 to claim the first Paralympic medal in the inaugural appearance.

UNSTOPPABLE SHEN

In a packed arena, China took an early lead in the fifth minute of the game. Yifeng Shen passed the puck from the left side of the opponent's zone to the middle where he found Zhidong Wang.

The 21-year-old did not have a tough task of capitalizing on a great pass by Shen to make the home crowd go wild.

The host nation doubled its lead at the start of the second period. Shen now took care of everything by himself and scored a beautiful goal after skating past one player and a goalie before flicking the puck into the top corner.

If it was not for the South Korean goalie Jae Woong Lee, the bronze medallists from PyeongChang 2018 would have suffered an even heavier defeat in the third period against China.

Lee had 19 saves in the game, but even he could not stop the hosts from scoring two more goals in the third period. Hongguan Li put his name on the scoresheet with two minutes to go, while Shen capitalized on an empty net in the last 15 seconds.

"I am very, very excited. It's honourable for us to have won a medal in these Paralympics," said Shen. "Despite the fact we could not change the colour of the medal from bronze to gold it's still a big achievement and our efforts made our dreams come true."

BRIGHT FUTURE

Yifeng Shen was China's best player in Beijing scoring eight goals and assisting for six more. Besides him, there is another emerging star in Zhidong Wang, who scored five and assisted for seven goals in total.

"We are a very young team. We scored a lot of goals," said Wang.

"The progress is very obvious. We are very confident we will have a greater stage for us to play on in the future."

China started its Para ice hockey programme in 2017 and in five years progressed from the World Championships C-Pool to World Championships A-Pool.

They have recently won the Ostersund 2021 World Championships B-Pool with five convincing wins in as many games.

With China being the only team to field a female player at the Beijing 2022, Jing Yu became only the second woman in Para ice hockey history to win a Paralympic medal.

First was Norwegian Brit Mjaasund Oeyen who took a silver at Lillehammer 1994 when the sport made its debut at the Paralympic Winter Games.

On its way to bronze, China triumphed in the three preliminary group games against Slovakia (7-0), Czech Republic (5-2) and Italy (6-0). In the qualifying finals, the host nation narrowly defeated Czech Republic again by 4-3.

USA and Canada will play in the gold-medal game on Sunday at 12:05 (local time, GMT+8) in the replay of the PyeongChang 2018 final.

Live streaming (geo-blocked in some territories) and live results from Beijing 2022 final will be available on Paralympic.org. You can follow all the action, behind the scenes and news on World Para Ice Hockey social media channels on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.