1990 Women's World Ice Hockey Championships

The 1990 IIHF World Women Championships were held March 19 to 25, 1990, at the Civic Centre in Ottawa, Canada. The Canadian team won the gold medal, the United States won silver, and Finland won bronze. This was the first IIHF-sanctioned international tournament in women's ice hockey.

There was strong international attention directed at the games. The gold medal game packed 9000 people into the arena and drew over a million viewers on television. For unknown reasons, the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association decided that the Canadian team should wear pink and white uniforms instead of the expected red and white. While the experiment only lasted for this tournament, Ottawa was taken over by a "pink craze" during the championships. Restaurants had pink-coloured food on special, and pink became a popular colour for flowers and bow ties.

Qualification Tournament
The United States and Canadian teams qualified automatically. A tournament in Asia took place between Korea, Japan, China, India and Hong Kong. Japan won the tournament.

The 1989 European Women's Ice Hockey Championship served as the qualification tournament for this championship. The top five finishers in the top pool qualified. They were Finland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and West Germany.

Final rankings




Scoring leaders
Canada's Dawn McGuire was named MVP of the gold medal game.

Bodychecking
This is the only major international tournament in Women's ice hockey to allow bodychecking. Before the tournament, bodychecking had been allowed in women's ice hockey in Europe. The European teams, knowing that they were less competitive than the North American teams, asked for bodychecking to be included. For some reason, the Europeans failed to realize the fact that while European women learned to play with other women, most North American players learned to play with men. Consequently, North American players were bigger than European players and used to playing a rougher game. This added to the already significant mismatch between the squads.

After this tournament, the International Ice Hockey Federation disallowed bodychecking in women's ice hockey. It is currently an infraction punished with a minor or major and game misconduct penalty.

In addition, the intermission between periods were twenty minutes instead of fifteen. This has since been abolished and changed to the usual fifteen minutes.