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PARIS — A new competition may be coming to the 2030 Winter Games in France, 3x3 hockey.
The International Ice Hockey Federation announced recently it's preparing "to bid for a new discipline at the Olympics" starting with the French Alps Olympics. The international federation overseeing hockey has been experimenting since the 2017-2018 season with tournaments using fewer players and a smaller rink.
Any addition to the Olympic sports program must be approved by the International Olympic Committee. A proposal is expected to be submitted in January, followed by a detailed response to a questionnaire in March. An IOC decision is expected by the fourth quarter of 2025, the federation said.
If the new event gets the go-ahead, that "could allow up to 240 more hockey players to take part in the Olympics — further broadening the reach and appeal of the game," according to the federation, and require a new venue. In France, the Olympic ice competitions are set to be held in Nice.
More Olympians could mean National Hockey League players participate in the Olympics, possibly including members of Utah's new NHL team. The NHL is back in the Winter Games after not participating in 2018, in Pyeongchang, South Korea, or in 2022, in Beijing.
Whether 3x3 hockey would be pitched to be part of Utah's next Olympics, the 2034 Winter Games, remains to be seen.
Utah Hockey Club owner Ryan Smith recently made public plans to move Olympic hockey competition from the Maverik Center in West Valley City that hosted hockey during the 2002 Winter Games to the Delta Center in Salt Lake City that's undergoing a massive makeover as part of a downtown revitalization.
Fraser Bullock, president and CEO of the Salt Lake City-Utah Committee for the Games that was awarded the 2034 Olympics and Paralympics by the IOC in July, wasn't ready to discuss the possibility of the new event being added to a Games that's already expected to cost a total of nearly $4 billion to host.
"No comment at this point," Bullock said. "We will observe what evolves with the federation over time."
Scaling down Olympic sports isn't new — men's and women's 3x3 basketball debuted at the 2020 Summer Games in Tokyo, held a year later due to COVID-19. At the 2024 Summer Games in Paris, former Brigham Young University basketball star Jimmer Fredette was on USA Basketball's first-ever 3x3 Olympic team but was injured early in the competition.
The sport is set to be a medal event at the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles, too. The LA Games have a list of new sports — baseball, softball, flag football, squash, lacrosse and cricket, which will also be played on a smaller scale in an effort to extend its popularity. Breaking, or break dancing, was added to this year's Paris Games but not carried over to 2028.
