The IOC offers the following Video News Release to all news agencies, broadcasters and online news platforms free of charge. When the International Olympic Committee (IOC) introduced Mixed National Olympic Committee (NOC) Ice Hockey 3-on-3 tournament at the Winter Youth Olympic Games (YOG), they gave coaches a unique challenge. The format saw eight squads of 13 players allocated from NOCs from around the world and battling it out for gold. So not only did the players not know each other, communication was an issue with the number of different languages spoken. The men’s and women’s events had gold medallists from 20 different nations, including the likes of Hong Kong, Luxembourg, Mexico and New Zealand. But coach Anders Lundberg from Sweden insists it wasn’t a problem, with the universal language of hockey coming to the rescue. He said: “Some guys speak, for instance, Russian, but they also speak English, and some players don’t speak English at all. We help each other out, but we all can speak hockey and that’s the main thing.”