The selected players also demonstrated their talent in football and basketball / warm meetings with old acquaintances
Work before pleasure! The training session on Tuesday ended up taking longer than planned, but it was the players who didn't want to stop: after the morning ice training followed by off-ice stretching, the cracks of the national ice hockey team even stayed until lunchtime in the attached sports hall to demonstrate their skills with the ball. In football and basketball, one or the other showed a lot of talent in addition to ice hockey. “We simply master everything,” joked Moritz Müller after a visibly sweaty morning.
The actors well deserved the afternoon off that followed. Some stayed in their rooms, others explored the surroundings on foot or sat in the sun - if they proved they were weatherproof in a fresh seven degrees Celsius and stormy winds. National coach Marco Sturm didn't ask for dinner again until 18 p.m. This time not in the hotel, but at an Italian restaurant in the center of Lillehammer, about a 15-minute walk from the hotel.
Today we're starting our third training session with fresh enthusiasm, and there's also a first video meeting scheduled for the evening. Sturm wants his players to internalize individual moves in detail in order to promote automatism. Their implementation will definitely be necessary at the preparatory start on Thursday against Norway (19 p.m., in the internet live stream on SPORT1), after all, the national team will face “a good challenge,” as the national coach said in advance.
Dennis Endras, Mathias Niederberger, Stephan Daschner and Bernhard Ebner will meet two old friends from the German Ice Hockey League (DEL), because after all the two Olimb brothers are in the hosts' squad. Mathis Olimb played one of his two seasons with the Augsburger Panthern (2007 – 2009) together with Endras in a team. Niederberger, Daschner and Ebner had brother Ken-André at the Düsseldorfer EG as a teammate (2013 – 2016). The first reunion at the hotel was correspondingly warm.