With Olympic arena ready for play, this Canadian ice expert's magic has given Italy its own 'Miracle on Ice'

< warm>Chris mother jones reports from milano.

46 years since the Americans witnessed their miracle on Olympic ice, the Italians — with some Canadian help — might be on the verge of one of their own.

Only a month ago, the Milano Santagiulia hockey arena was a construction site. Cranes obscured the façade. An abandoned car blocked the main entrance. Workers left a trail of paper espresso cups, as though they might need them to find their way back through the maze of temporary fencing.

A test event three weeks ago failed to ease mounting concerns. Don Moffatt, the 67-year-old Canadian ice master, had stood on his creation, staring at his rink like a farmer worrying about his slow crops. 

He hadn’t lost a loonie in it — "There’s nothing in this ice but pure reverse-osmosis water,” he said Tuesday — but drywall dust and dirt made the ice look grey, and a hole appeared during the first period of the first game, requiring a patch that went viral.

As recently as last week, Moffatt still wasn’t sure he’d manage to make a playable surface. 

“I was like, okay, we could be the laughingstock of the world, because this might not happen,” he said. “That’s how close we were.”

Moffatt had begun fearing the dust and dirt would surface during the weeks of fierce competition ahead, the way a splinter works its way to the skin. “It’s all trying to get to the top,” he said. He decided to shave the ice down to the pipes of refrigerant that run beneath it and pour a clean sheet.

But when he arrived last Monday with a full crew to begin his rebuild, he was halted yet again by the construction around him, and an inch of muddy water in his Zamboni room.

“I’ve never had a challenge like this,” Moffatt said. “I waited until the last possible second.”

He remembered how his dad had built their backyard rink in Peterborough, Ont., and set about his own late-night work. After an epic 12-hour shift, he’d poured his foundation. He slept for two hours and came back Tuesday to paint the hockey markings and Olympic logo at the centre of his new rink, and then he layered four more inches of ice, flood after flood. 

“That went just fabulously,” Moffatt said. “On Monday, I was 50-50. On Tuesday, I was more like 80-20.”

A week removed from that sleepless stretch and three days before play begins, Moffatt looked serene. He no longer stared at his ice with concern, worrying over forces beyond his control. He looked more like a man standing on a shore, considering a frozen lake.

“I’m completely confident,” Moffatt said. “This ice is ready for the NHL.”

First, the women will open play here when Czechia faces Switzerland later this week. Moffatt watched the French practice on his ice Tuesday morning, and he was pleased by how hard they took to it.

“It’s like a muscle. You need to break it down and then build it back stronger. There was a lot of snow, a lot of skate marks, and the more that can happen, the stronger I can get it — by fixing it.”

What Moffatt can’t fix is the strange sound his ice makes.

Because the Milano Santagiulia is a concert hall that will never host hockey again, the pipes of refrigerant have been laid on top of its concrete floor rather than beneath it, the way they normally are. That has left the ice sounding hollow, amplifying the telltale clatter of hockey into a deafening crescendo. 

“I’m going to try to warn as many of the teams as I can,” Moffatt said. “There’s nothing they’ve skated on that sounds like this. It’s so loud. When the big guys are cutting corners, it sounds like they’re tearing the ice apart.”

The noise of hammers and drills also continued to echo through the rafters. A small army of men in blue track suits wiped the scuff marks off the glass behind him, mirroring the efforts of concession workers upstairs, polishing counters that didn’t exist only weeks ago. 

“The building is absolutely gorgeous,” Moffatt said, looking up at the arena lights.

A new, larger scoreboard had been lifted into place, and an incredible network of sixty cameras was ready to capture every possible angle of the action.

Moffatt, who’s at his fifth Olympics, took a moment to take it all in. “I lost a lot of weight here,” he said. “I somehow haven’t lost a lot of hair.”

Now the winning time is about to begin.

Senior Contributor

Chris Jones is a journalist and screenwriter who began his career covering baseball and boxing for the National Post. He later joined Esquire magazine, where he won two National Magazine Awards for his feature writing. His memoir, Legs Hearts Minds: Loss and Its Remedies, will be published by Random House in June.

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