Video

For those looking for a new pursuit to to keep them busy through the long winter, ice hockey may be just the thing. Played under the ice of a frozen lake and upside down, this isn't a sport for the thin skinned. Forget ice skates, helmets, shoulder pads, elbow pads and heavily padded shorts. What you need for this kind of hockey is a wet suit, flippers and a good set of lungs. Under ice hockey is a new craze among freedivers and extreme sports lovers who do not mind a bit of a chill. The game is played with teams of two men in a rink 6 metres wide and 8 metres long, under 30 centimetres of ice. Playing without oxygen tanks, the players chase a styrofoam puck with a hockey stick into goals fastened to the ice cover upside down. They surface for air approximately every 30 seconds through the holes cut in the ice. To prevent the players from swimming outside the boundaries of the playing area, the rink is marked by multi-coloured boards. Each match has three periods, according to hockey rules, but they are reduced to 10 minutes and there is a 10 minute break between each period when players get out of the water to warm up in a tent heated to 40 degrees Celsius. Body checking and charging is allowed just like in regular ice hockey, the only forbidden thing is taking another player's diving goggles off. For the audience to be able to share the excitement of the competition under the ice, a camera shoots everything that is going on under the feet of the audience and show...