List of outdoor ice hockey games

Playing hockey games outdoors, in soccer, football and baseball stadiums, is an increasingly popular trend for junior, college, professional and international competitions in the 21st century. The popularity of outdoor games has resulted in attendance records in several leagues, and the current world record total of 104,173 was set at The Big Chill at the Big House, a December 2010 National Collegiate Athletic Association game between the University of Michigan and Michigan State University.

While other indoor sports such as basketball have been able to use outdoor tennis courts and even aircraft carriers for outdoor games, this is rarely possible in ice hockey because a regulation rink is generally much wider and longer than the playing surface available in either of those venues. Ice hockey has however been played at Stade Roland Garros, venue of the French Open. Staging a Vysshaya liga game on the Russian carrier Admiral Kuznetsov has been considered as well. To compensate for the varying weather conditions at outdoor ice hockey games, the teams may switch sides after each half of a period.

In the early history of hockey, games were played outdoors on rivers, lakes, and other naturally occurring ice surfaces. In fact, the first indoor game, held in 1875, was a novelty at the time, yet after that the game moved inside. While the first Olympic hockey tournament, held in 1920, was played indoors, games at the first Winter Olympics in 1924 were the first of several such tournaments to be played outdoors. Games at the World Championships were occasionally played outdoors, including the 1957 gold medal game between the Soviet Union and Sweden at the Lenin Stadium in Moscow. The attendance at that game was approximately 55,000, a number that stood as a record for more than 40 years. In 1954, the Detroit Red Wings of the National Hockey League (NHL) played an exhibition game on an outdoor ice surface against the inmates of Michigan's Marquette Branch Prison.

...
Wikipedia