The Canadian ice expert faced with making Olympic hockey arena playable

Chris Jones reports from Italy ahead of the Milano Cortina Olympics.

Don Moffatt, the “ice master” reluctantly drawn into the spotlight at the Milano Santagiulia hockey arena, began his relationship with the game and its surface like so many young Canadians: watching his dad flood their backyard rink in Peterborough, Ont., his wide eyes reflected in the shimmering ice.

The 67-year-old has since become an internationally renowned expert in ice and its fickle tendencies. He’s now making the ice at his fifth Winter Olympics — the toughest challenge of his long career.

Construction delays meant that Moffatt couldn’t begin building his latest rink until just before Christmas, the sparks from welders dancing around him when he began his first pour.

Normally, ice gets tested for months, even years, before it’s used in high-level competition. Moffatt’s latest creation was less than three weeks old when several Italian teams skated on it this weekend, watched closely by the NHL and nervous hockey fans around the world.

Three games were played on Saturday, an attempt to mimic Olympic-size demands. The ice held up relatively well considering the pressure on it. Coverage of a small hole during Friday’s opening game went viral, and the green watering can used to fix it became the latest character in the ongoing arena saga.

The NHL is expected to announce on Sunday whether it will release its players for their first Olympics since 2014.

Organizers have expressed confidence that the best players in the world will be in Milan in February. “100 per cent,” Andrea Francisi, the chief games operations officer, said rink side on Friday.

But Moffatt is aware that his ice will determine whether the men’s tournament in fact goes ahead. A news conference with him on Saturday was abruptly cancelled after he decided, understandably, that he had more pressing concerns.

Instead, organizers released a statement that Moffatt is “happy and satisfied with the field of play.” He also said that Friday’s hole and repair were “minor details and in line with the usual process.”

His first Olympics were in Torino in 2006, when the rink cracked all the way through to its foundation minutes before the opening game between Canada and Italy. Moffatt managed to fix it just in time, as though he’d saved skiers from a chasm in a glacier, unaware of the disaster they’d avoided.

He also made the ice on which Sidney Crosby scored his golden goal in Vancouver in 2010 and in Beijing in 2022. When concerns were raised about the size of the sheet in Milan — it’s about three feet shorter than NHL ice, cut from the neutral zone — they were allayed, in part, when it was remembered that the rink in Beijing was the same size.

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Now it’s a question of its quality.

The way all obsessives see something almost spiritual about the objects of their passion, Moffatt considers ice something like a living thing, with its own habits and yearnings, weaknesses and wishes. It is not frozen water. It is an entity all its own, elastic rather than static, that rests in a state of perfection for only brief, beautiful stretches.

In that way, Moffatt is a scientist as much as he’s an artist. Great ice is smooth, hard, and fast. Even small changes in building temperature, humidity, and surface conditions can turn a crystalline sheet into slush in short order. He keeps a little black book of the ideal numbers for each measurement, which he takes several times a day, like a chemist tinkering with a potion.

But there remains an element of feel to his work. Between periods of Saturday’s first game, Moffatt walked out onto the ice in black boots. He pushed at it with his toes in a spot not far from Friday’s repair and looked at it for a long time, like a man lost in thought in an ice hut, waiting for his line to jump.

He isn’t the only one still at work, and Milano Santagiulia’s late delivery has presented Moffatt another challenge: dust.

Construction continued around him. The safety barriers in the upper deck still need to be installed. Drywall waited to be sanded. Totally pure water doesn’t bond well, the way concrete needs rebar. But too many impurities can make the ice look foggy, almost dirty.

On Saturday, the ice started looking a little snowy, a little grey. Moffatt has 25 days before the first Olympians take to his rink. Period after period, game after game, he took his measurements and made adjustments that only he could see. Each intermission, nearly every chance he had, he walked back out and felt it under his feet, staring at his reflection once again, the way he did when he was a boy.

Only this time, his eyes narrowed. There was still work to be done before the wonder.