I Hate This Team: Hockey in Canada and Losing as Nation Building (inperson)

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In this presentation, I follow the methodology of my 2024 book Muscle Works (2024) in considering sport as theatre. Here I move to consider team sport, specifically men’s ice hockey, and how its choreographies of bodies within an industrial field comprising players, franchise, corporation, media, local and national communities, form structures of feeling. First purportedly played in Montréal around 1875, hockey is often framed as “Canada’s game”, a performance with a central role in the formation of hegemonic Canadian identity (Gruneau and Wilson 1994; Lorenz 2015; Allain 2019).Critical studies on sport and nation building often focus on “winning”: triumphant moments that affectively bind citizens to the “imagined community” (Anderson 1983). But in 2025, it has become clear that losing is equally potent a force in national imaginings. Within the context of the “Elbows Up” movement (a grassroots economic boycott catalysed by the U.S. government’s threats against Canadian sovereignty), a losing Canadian team represents both a challenge to national identity and a space for its building. As a born and raised Vancouverite, I know a lot about losing. This presentation begins from the position of being a fan of the Vancouver Canucks, who currently occupy the 32nd (dead last) spot in the National Hockey League (NHL). Analysing the discourses that have emerged from fans, media, and the organization and teams themselves, I suggest that the local-national affect of the Canucks’ losing season can be organized into three structures of feeling. First, a melancholic state that circles around lack of possibilities and potentially catalyses dangerous feelings of resentment. Second, a state of mourning, tied to the project of “tanking” for the possibility of a top spot in the draft, that accepts the team/nation’s vulnerable position yet occludes its colonial realities. Finally, an affective structure, located in the performative relationship between players and spectators, in which moments of play transcend the reality of the score.

Speaker:

Broderick D.V. Chow is Reader and Director of Learning, Teaching and Inclusion at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London. His research investigates sport, fitness, and physical culture in relation to masculinities, East and Southeast Asian representation in theatre, Philippine performance, and anti-racist pedagogical and creative practice. He teaches on the Masters in Musical Theatre course at Central, as well as leading the New Earth Academy programme, offering free, intensive training for East and Southeast Asian actors. He is the author of the David Bradby Monograph Prize-winning Muscle Works: Physical Culture and the Performance of Masculinity (Northwestern University Press, 2024).

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