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where was team Canada in 1980?
The amateur championship club of team Canada finished 6th in those Olympics. Canada did not send a squad in 1972 and 1976, actively boycotting Olympic hockey because it was well known that the communist nations were fielding their teams full of professionals, which was taboo in those days because the Olympics was still considered a strictly amateur athletics competition.
More than any other country Canadian amateur hockey was handcuffed by the lure of professionalism in the 60s, 70s and 80s. The squad they sent was scarcely as strong as any minor-professional club, and hence had a tendency to get eaten alive by the european super teams, whom had no distinction or descrepancy and so often sent their best and brightest to the games. It was only in the late 80s and early 90s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the raiding of european talent by the NHL that the amateur Olympic competition sank back to a level playing field......but by then the IOC realized what a depleted spectacle it had become when all the good players had turned professional, and so in the late 90s the Olympics have been opened to the best of the best now, not just amateurs.
But that's beside the point. If anything it illustrates how the US team in 1980--a ragtag bunch of college students and castoffs--rose against impossible odds to beat a Soviet team that was easily good enough to win the Stanley Cup. One of the biggest upsets in sporting history, not just hockey.
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