Sports expert to speak on winter games' significance to Canada at UNBC

An expert in sport from the University of Michigan is in the city to talk about the significant of winter sports.

With the Canada Winter games just a few months away, Professor Andrei Markovits’ speech comes a topical time, as he focuses on how team-based ball-and-puck-oriented sports have become so engrained in our social, daily culture.

“What I’ll be talking about is some of the history of winter sports,” he says. “Contextualizing it in the larger context of, what I call dominant sports culture, meaning how very few sports, mainly centred around team-specific ball-oriented … and I hope you will permit me to call a hockey puck a ‘ball’, how these have become much larger than just the fact that they are games, but are a part of our daily culture.”

It’s obvious that sport, especially hockey has become deeply entrenched in our national culture and Markovits explains why.

“Just how it has become so powerful in terms of our emotions our daily lives,” he says.

Markovits also goes into Canadians’ love of sports come from some huble roots.

“It was developed out of these weird, completely localized, unimportant games between 1860 and 1920, and has become a national obsession, a complete form of cultural iconography.,” he says.

Markovits is spending some time in the city, giving a speech to UNBC’S faculty at noon, followed by another speech to the SPCA about his research into dog rescuing and compassion.

First up, his winter sport speech at UNBC starts at 7 tonight at lecture theatre 7-152.