Diplomatic game

Team members of the UBC Thunderbirds posed for a group photo on Oct 17, 2012. Bob Frid / For China Daily

While ping-pong may have thawed tensions with the US, hockey built the bridge between China, Canada

Bob Hindmarch is a name that is all too familiar to many Chinese athletes at the University of British Columbia (UBC), where Canada's National Hockey Program was born.

"I have made many Chinese friends during the six or seven times I have toured China since my first visit to the country in 1973," Hindmarch, UBC's most successful Thunderbirds hockey coach, told China Daily.