Team Finland Unveils 2022 Olympic Hockey Jerseys

The Finnish Ice Hockey Association unveiled the Nike jerseys they’ll be wearing when they take the ice for the 2022 Winter Olympic Games to be held in Beijing, China just three months from now.

The jerseys, modelled in the photo above by Finnish hockey players Annina Rajahuhta and Kimmo Timonen, show the crowned lion from the Nordic nation’s 440-year-old coat of arms placed on a horizontal blue stripe. The “home” set is white, the “road” a navy blue. Both jerseys feature a darker blue dot pattern within this horizontal stripe. Player numbers are one colour, they’re that same lighter blue as the stripe on the white set, the navy blue jersey uses white numbers.

The design marks a bit of a departure from the typical “let’s try something really new” style Nike usually brings to its Olympic hockey uniforms. It’s a welcome change for this sports uniform writer who is a fan of the “less is more” and tends to prefer a traditional look to hockey jerseys.

If we take a look back at some of Nike’s previous Finnish Olympic hockey jerseys you’ll see a mixed bag of “keep it simple” and, well, the complete opposite from tournament to tournament:

Nike has typically applied a template across every (or most) teams in the Olympics, unfortunately, hopefully we see a little more uniqueness and creativity in 2022 — that stripe on Finland looks pretty good, but it’ll certainly lose its appeal if nine (women’s) to eleven (men’s) other countries are wearing the same thing.

The 2022 Winter Olympics hockey tournament begins with the women’s side on February 3rd with the men starting theirs six days later on the ninth.