Chris Stewart hoping to replicate Cool Runnings Olympic magic with Jamaican hockey team
By Scott Burnside
Seems like an awfully long way from the IceDen in Coral Springs, Florida to the as-yet built hockey structure in Milan where the 2026 Olympic hockey tournament will be played.
But no further, perhaps, than the distance traveled by the Jamaican bobsled team from the dusty roads and hills Jamaica to the icy bobsled track at the Calgary Olympics in 1988.
As with all such journeys, the consideration of distance traveled isn’t necessarily measured in the miles between points, but the will to complete such a journey.
“Sure, when guys think, oh, Jamaica ice hockey, the first thing they say is, like the movie Cool Runnings,” former NHLer Chris Stewart said with a laugh.
Same, but different as it turns out.
“Uh, no, we have a real hockey team,” Stewart said.
Not just a hockey team but a good one as it turns out. Drawing players mostly from North America who have Jamaican heritage (about half have Jamaican passports and the other half have submitted paperwork for their passports) the Jamaican National Ice Hockey Team, coached by Stewart, was recently deemed too competitive to compete in a recent international event held at the Florida Panthers’ practice facility.
Instead of being part of the Latin America Cup (LATAM) tournament schedule – a tournament the Jamaican team won two years ago, before COVID-19 – Team Jamaica played a series of exhibition games against some of the competing teams including Mexico, Colombia, Puerto Rico and Lebanon. For the most part, Jamaica won by lopsided scores.
“You can feel the eyes on us,” Stewart said. “We come off the bus and we’re all dressed in our yellow golf shirts and slacks and we’re moving as a unit. And when we get out there we play some pretty good hockey. You definitely feel the energy in the air when Jamaica shows up.”
The odyssey that culminated with the Jamaican bobsled team qualifying for and then taking part in the ’88 Olympics in Calgary was chronicled in the 1993 movie called Cool Runnings. The popular movie included plenty of artistic license mostly in the comedic vein and featured John Candy in one of his last performances before his untimely death.
If the shadow of that Hollywood treatment fell squarely over the real story of those Jamaican athletes and organizers. The same shadow continues to fall, in some ways, on Stewart and the group of organizers who have been working for a decade to see hockey gain a foothold in Jamaican. The group now has its collective sights set on the 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy.
But if the memory of that long-ago movie helps draw people to the Jamaican Olympic Ice Hockey Federation (JOIHF) and their mission to get an arena built in Jamaica — which is one of the critical stepping stones to becoming a country recognized for international qualification by the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) — well, so be it.
“It certainly is the same buzz,” said Sean Caple, the Director of Hockey Operations for the national team (that’s coached by Stewart) as well as a board member with JOIHF. “That’s the first thing people go to is Cool Runnings. And to your point, you want to feed off that novelty. But I think with the product we’re putting on the ice and the way we’ve been competing and playing, we still have that seriousness about it and the competitive piece of it.”
“It’s not just a bunch of guys running up a hill on a tin can. All due respect to them,” Caple added a reference to some of the images from the movie that showed the bobsled team training in an old Volkswagen or on a wooden cart.
And there are some real-life connections to the bobsled team.
Don Anderson is the president of the JOIHF and as a longtime sport figure in Jamaica. Anderson was part of the organizational network that assisted the bobsled team in realizing their Olympic dream in 1988.
And Devon Harris, one of the real-life Olympic bobsled team member, was part of the first delegation that traveled to Jamaica to discuss the idea of creating an ice hockey community in Jamaica a decade ago.
“He and I stay in contact quite often,” Caple said. “He was involved in the early stages of this and sharing his experiences and their challenges.”
Challenges? Oh yes there are plenty of those.
In order to become part of the process that might one day lead to a Jamaican national hockey team that competes against other IIHF sanctioned federations for the chance to qualify for the Olympics, a nation must have a defined grassroots hockey program. They must also have a rink in which the game can be played that’s able to host competitions.
The JOIHF has already had communication with the National Hockey League Players’ Association through the NHLPA’s successful Goals and Dreams Foundation. Twenty sets of gear will be sent to Jamaica to help begin off-ice programs.
There are plans for an inline facility that will further help allow newcomers to hockey in Jamaica understand the nuances of the game.
“As far as the grassroots I think the foundation for that has been pretty much laid,” Stewart said.
And plans are underway for the critical piece to the puzzle, an ice rink.
One plan calls for the rink to be connected to a sports and physical education themed institution, G.C. Foster College in Spanish Town, although finding appropriate land for construction remains an issue.
It’s believed the cost to build the facility would be $8 million. Now that the hockey team has finished up its competition in South Florida, the focus will be on getting a shovel in the ground for that facility, Caple said.
“Now the real work starts,” Caple said.
While there is important work to be done in Jamaica, Stewart and Caple will continue to spread the word about Jamaican hockey to alert all those who might qualify through their ancestry to join the team, either now or in the future. In Florida, for instance, players showed up to cheer on the team and indicate their interest in the program.
And before one game Stewart and the players visited a local Jamaican church where they had lunch with the pastor, who blessed the team before their match.
“The interest itself has been phenomenal,” Caple said. “We had a couple of kids show up just to our games who are of Jamaican descent and heard we were playing, and they play hockey here in Florida and they said, hey, we want to be involved.”
A major sponsor, Arizona-based Geneva Financial, has lent the support of their marketing arm in getting out the word on the Jamaican National Ice Hockey team and their dreams of playing in the Olympics. That support included taping some of the behind the scenes moments in South Florida during the team’s exhibition series there.
“They sent out a producer and a director with our group to begin documenting not just this tournament but the whole story,” Caple said.
The mission to see this team move from novelty to Olympic reality has a special place in Stewart’s heart. Stewart’s family emigrated to the Toronto area from Jamaica and he and brother Anthony went on to become first-round NHL draft picks. Stewart ended up playing 668 NHL regular season games.
Stewart recently purchased the iconic Minnesota Hockey Camps near Brainerd, Minnesota, the brainchild of former Miracle On Ice head coach Herb Brooks and Chuck Grillo in the late 1970s.
Stewart had trained and spent time at the camps since being drafted 18th overall by Colorado in 2006. Now he hopes the facility could also be the location for future international exhibitions as the Jamaican team continues to grow and evolve.
“Everybody is committed to this program,” Stewart said. “And everybody wants a shot to play some of these other countries as a kind of measuring stick. That’s definitely at the top of our agenda. We’re going to start brainstorming and put some action behind it.”
