I agree with what Duck says, although he is only focussing on one game. If you want to win a tournament then you have to be able to play as well in the last game as the first. Most tournaments that you will have played Sven would be one or possibly two day tournaments. Even then performance drops when endurance training has been neglected, but especially when you go to a major tournament where games are over a one or two week period then if you do not have stamina then you will not win a medal.

Hate to bring them up as an example, but at Worlds it was Colombia. They were extremely fit, but also played an incredibly demanding style of hockey. We played them first game of the tournament and last game, and their intensity had dropped on the last day - the reason we were able to beat them then. I think everyone at Worlds thought that Colombia deserved a medal.

People may neglect it because it is boring training to do, and doing lots of swimming can mean initially that your speed suffers. As you get closer to a tournament though, and shift your training to more sprint training the result is that you are faster,

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Faster than a speeding puck...