Ignacio Contardo is unemployed after quitting his bank job in 2022. The brothers Fernando and Felipe Renz work as an account manager at one of Chile’s biggest beverage companies and a fruit retailing company respectively. Axel Troncoso works as a software engineer at Synopsys Chile. Nils Strabucchi studies agriculture at a university in Santiago.
You can see them all together in the Chile men’s hockey national team that is currently in India for the country’s debut at FIH Hockey Men’s World Cup. What brings them together is their love for hockey which has seen them travel 17,000 kms across 12 time zones to represent Chile.
“The World Cup is important because every match is a final for us. We have small goals. Score a goal in the World Cup, then take some points and why not win some matches,” Chile head coach Jorge Dabanch had told Scroll.in during a pre tournament interaction.
On Saturday, Dabanch’s men achieved one of those targets when Ignacio Contardo scored his country’s first-ever men’s World Cup goal in a 3-1 loss to New Zealand.
Hockey is not the biggest sport in Chile. That honour belongs to football while one could say athletics, rugby and volleyball jostle for second place in the South American country. With…
