For  those who come to the Winter Olympics only to delve helplessly through the nuances of judged sports and mysterious matters of presentation, style and form there is something old-fashioned and reassuring about the ice hockey competition, writes Tom Humphries

Teams. Goals. Winners and losers. It feels like terra firma.

And ice hockey has lots more going for it too. A storied Olympic tradition. All these new-fangled winter sports are splendid but it's nice to be able to flick back through the record books and get a glimpse of the legacy that today's players are heir to. And ice hockey has a genuine place in the hearts of the nations who compete.

Is there a story more compelling at these games than Canada's anxiety to regain its lost dominance of the sport? Canada's diluted influence on the game is symptomatic maybe of what has gone wrong with the game in North America. For the last couple of decades ice hockey has been busy chasing the market, expanding its league ferociously to take in places like Anaheim and Florida and Carolina and Nashville. Teams have moved, Canadian strength has been diluted by the influx of Europeans, television hasn't found hockey sexy, so the seasons are long as the game depends on live audiences.

What skill is left in the league is spread over too many teams. Only lately has hockey managed to embrace the idea of diversity and it is still predominantly a white man's league.

Talk to those who grew up loving the game and they'll list the entire roster of the last Blackhawks team to have won a Stanley Cup, but they won't have seen a live game in years. Worse, they don't really want their kids to play hockey. They like them just fine with teeth.

The Olympics are different, though. A small number of evenly-matched sides. Canada, Sweden, Finland, The Czech Republic and a couple of others all have expectations of doing well. There are fantastic rivalries and fabled games and better still the Olympic acceptance of professional hockey players has worked considerably better than it did in basketball. Most European hockey powers find it possible to put out credible teams drawn from the NHL ranks.

And the attitude towards the enforcers is different. Fighting is a not permitted in the Games. It is a marketing tool in the NHL. Players who fight on the ice in Salt Lake City are tossed out of the game, so teams don't select players who fight.

Locally, for obvious reasons, the big game of the tournament so far has been the 2-2 draw between the US and Russia on Saturday. The Cold War is dead, but memories of the Miracle on Ice at Lake Placid 22 years ago still give that fixture some spice. The Americans haven't lost to the Russians for 70 years in the US so when Brett Hull slid home a late equaliser the cheering shook the Wasatch mountains.

Sunday's game between the Olympic champions from the Czech Republic and the unfancied Swedish team was better, though. The Czechs are the title holders and have won the World Championships every year since 1998. They put players on the ice who even to the casual onlooker possess a grace and a flair for the game that is special. Jaromir Jagr moves around the opposition goal area with an almost feral air, Patrick Elias with streaky brilliance.

They opened up here in Salt Lake City with a pleasurable 8-2 devouring of Germany. It's not often in any sport that Germans are made to look hapless, but there it was.

The Swedes, though, were always going to be a different story. They won the Olympic title in Lillehammer eight years ago but since then have lost their talisman Peter Forsberg and without him all attention turned to Mats Sundin of the Toronto Maple Leafs.

The Swedes played with a calculated deliberation that seems wholly native to them. They went ahead early on during a power play when one of the Czech was sitting in the sin-bin and they then had a goal disallowed for reasons fathomable only to the cognoscenti. Something like offside, I was told.

In the second quarter Sundin slipped a sly shot from out left through the legs of the Czech goalkeeper Domink "The Dominator" Hasek. The Czechs pulled one back in the second period and the third was a series of frantic calculations, Czech cat trying to outsmart Swedish mouse, but all to no avail: 2-1 it was.

The final stages continue all week and we vowed as we left that a yellow and blue Swedish jersey would be a fitting souvenir.