Today, in the interests of expanding my mind and learning about “sports”, I decided to study ice hockey via the medium of the new ice-hockey documentary Heated Rivalry (Sky Atlantic). It’s tempting to write “ice hockey” off as just “Canadian snow hurling”, but there’s far more to it than that, as I’ve learned from the first three episodes.
So let me tell you about how ice hockey works. To start with, two teams of sturdy gentlemen dressed in baggy clothes and helmets, and wielding curved wooden sticks, face each other across an expanse of ice.
Then each team casts smouldering, longing looks at one another.
Delivering a convincing smouldering look is, it seems, one of the key skills in ice hockey. (I jot this down.) Everyone cheers.
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There are two types of person in ice hockey.
There’s the devil-may-care Russian type of hockey player, who smokes cigarettes and has a troublesome family back in Russia.
And then there’s the uptight Canadian sort of hockey player, who cares about brand deals and strives to please his ambitious mother.
Both are, it is fair to say, “hunks”. And both know how to deliver the best smouldering looks.
The next phase of the game is “sexually suggestive banter”. Lads will be lads, after all. This is instigated, most usually, by the Russian, who is very cocky (in many senses of that word). The uptight Canadian gets tongue-tied and blushes. The crowd cheers.
The teams arrive at another ice field, where, once again, the young hockey hunks attempt to gain possession of the precious ice disc they crave. One of their teams has a logo that includes an elevated cannon. It feels like a metaphor for something. Probably capitalism, I conclude.
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Our heroes go away to have a long, luxurious shower in the communal changing rooms. This scene stars the hockey players’ bums in significant if nonspeaking roles. The two of them gaze at each other for some time. (Clarification: their faces gaze, not their bums.) They are presumably assessing one another’s approach to postgame care. “It’s important for ice hockey players to be clean!” I write in my notebook.
Another important part of ice hockey is, I discover next, the sexting. When playing ice hockey it’s important to be precise with your pre- and postgame sexting, particularly when the sextee is your sworn rival, a hunky Russian with moody eyes.
Sometimes, indeed, sexting can be very distracting from the other things you have to do as an ice-hockey player – propelling a sliding obsidian puck into some mesh, for example. Sometimes the steamy sexting is so compelling that you could argue this programme isn’t focusing enough on the propelling-an-obsidian-puck-into-some-mesh element of the game at all. I disagree. That bit of ice hockey is really boring.
Instead there’s a lot more focus on what I assume are special ice-hockey exercises. Our heroes engage in these nudely, like Spartans. I try to draw diagrams. These exercises are quite vigorous, and we get to see them all in detail. But not that much detail.
Another skilled member of the ice-hockey team is the specialist cameraperson who manages to film our heroes in various nude positions without ever risking full frontal nudity. “Excellent cinematography!” I write in my notebook, and I’m sure the hockey fans cheer from the stalls.
As I’m considering all this, I’m beginning to think that ice hockey might not be the true point of Heated Rivalry and that this might, in fact, be a pretty sweet and tender love story about lovelorn young men who are unable to be together thanks to the stubborn homophobia of the sporting world.
Actually, this possibly explains how this relatively low-budget Canadian drama has achieved such outsize international success and such a passionate audience.
Okay, let me go away to do some Googling. (That’s not a euphemism.)
Right! So this programme isn’t really an ice-hockey documentary at all. It’s a romantic drama about two charismatic young hockey players, Ilya (Connor Storrie) and Shane (Hudson Williams), and how they interact as rivals and lovers across months and then years.
Now things make sense. And by “things” I mean all the energetic riding. Ice hockey probably isn’t even a real sport. It’s probably totally made up, like quidditch and squash.
It’s brilliant to see the success of Heated Rivalry. Romance fiction is generally having a cultural moment, but this is a type of story that’s still rare on television. (It’s based on a series of books by Rachel Reid.) Consequently, despite this show hitting a lot of the beats of classic star-crossed-lover narratives, it has something new and real to say about human longing and joy in the face of unthinking bigotry and kneejerk conformity.
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Setting it all in the heady world of sport instead of, say, that of dance or literature gives it a set of stakes absent from many contemporary romance stories. It has wonderful TV forerunners – Queer as Folk, The L Word, Heartstopper, It’s a Sin, Lip Service – but these are ensemble productions about groups of friends or teen dramas or period pieces. There aren’t many queer romances on TV, and there are certainly very few set in the world of sport.
Despite the fashion for performative cruelty and exclusion, representation is really important. It means something. LGBTQ+ people deserve to be able to see themselves in steamy love stories. But, beyond that, by changing the standard formula, all viewers, not just gay people, get something energised and new.
Heated Rivalry is fun and moving and filled with lust and longing, but its success is also a vindication of TV creators like Jacob Tierney, its showrunner, who are taking risks at a time when many networks are retrenching into conservative safety. And it is, of course, an opportunity to learn about ice hockey. And also, if you like, to learn a few other new hobbies.
Another showrunner, Sterlin Harjo, has also specialised in underrepresented communities on TV. In his beautiful, moving and funny series Reservation Dogs he told dreamy tales about Native American teenagers on an Oklahoma reservation.
His newest show, The Lowdown (Disney+), seems to be a more traditional noir crime drama about an eccentric bookshop owner and journalist, Lee Raybon (Ethan Hawke), as he doggedly investigates local corruption. But it is, in reality, a characterful and humane ensemble piece, a rich portrait of a diverse community living in Tulsa.
The fifth episode guest-stars Peter Dinklage as Raybon’s semi-estranged friend Wendell, and it features a scene between the two of them that I’ve been thinking about ever since. It’s one of the most beautifully raw depictions of ageing friendship I’ve seen onscreen. I highly recommend it: more men being vulnerable and true to themselves. It’s almost romantic.
