The most dominant team in the history of sports isn’t the New York Yankees or the Montreal Canadiens. It was the Soviet Union's national ice hockey team. Never in the history of sports was a game dominated by a single team for so long.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union’s ideology was that sports were a way to show dominance over the West. The West played hockey and the Soviet Union did not. It was decided that a hockey program would be built to compete. A man named Anatoli Tarasov was appointed by the Soviet government to build the hockey program from scratch and he would develop an entirely new way to play the game.

The Canadian style of hockey at the time was a very straightforward, clear the puck and go get it system where they skated up and down the ice. The one player with the puck dictated the play as the other four players were dependent on him. Tarasov had his players crisscrossing each other on the ice and playing a puck possession style, a style the game had never seen before, where the one player with the puck depended on the other four without the puck.

On top of this new style of play that left their opponents helplessly mesmerized as the Soviet players skated past them and shot the puck into their net with ease, they were physically superior to their opponents. Tarasov’s training methods were physically demanding and highly unorthodox.

The Soviet players were all signed to 25-year military contracts and would eat, sleep and breathe hockey. It was their job. The players would practice for hours on the ice every day as well as lift weights for hours. Their off-ice summer training was perhaps even more brutal. Players would have to do sprints in shallow waters, throw boulders, retrieve them and throw them again, carry their teammates up and down stairs or hills and sometimes their heart rates would reach 250 beats per minute.

Vladislav Tretiak, one of the greatest goaltenders to have ever played the game and long time Soviet goalie, was one of the many players to experience Tarasov’s training regimen. “If I let in just one puck, Tarasov would ask me the next day what’s the matter,” Tretiak said. “If it was my fault, my punishment would follow immediately. After everybody else had gone home, I had to do hundreds of lunges and somersaults. I could have cheated and not done them at all, since nobody was watching me. The coaches had gone home too! But I wouldn't even have considered doing one less lunge or somersault. I trusted Tarasov, trusted his every word, even when he criticized me for letting the pucks in my net during practice."

The training that the Soviet players endured made them into hockey machines. Opponents did not know how to defend the Soviet offense as the Soviet players constantly circled, always in motion while passing the puck to each other. Many Soviet goals were the result of plays that would leave the goaltender diving in desperation, in a hopeless effort to stop the Soviet player from putting the puck into the net.

Although Tarasov was dismissed as head coach of the Soviet team in 1972, for what many assume to be political reasons, the Soviet team and the players he had trained steamrolled over any opponents in their way. From 1954 to 1991, the Soviet national team won 19 gold medals, seven silver medals and four bronze medals in the World Championships. In the Olympics, the Soviets would dominate as well win gold in 1956, 1964, 1968, 1972, 1976, 1984 and 1988.

The Soviets knew they were going to win. So did their opponents.

The Soviet players were so good that teams in the National Hockey League had begun to draft them. Sava Fetisov, a defensemen and captain of the national team and Alexei Kasatonov were drafted by the New Jersey Devils and Vladislav Tretiak was drafted by the Montreal Canadiens, along with a few other players to other teams. The Soviet government never told many of the players that they had been drafted, so many of these legendary players never played in the National Hockey League.

Some of the Soviet players eventually did make it over to the United States with a varying degree of success during the fall of the Soviet Union. Fetisov, Kasatonov and Igor Larionov were three who did. However, many of the players did struggle adapting to the North American style of play, which was much rougher and slower — not as graceful as the Soviet style of play.

The reason that the Soviet players had difficulty adapting to North American hockey was simple: They did not have the rest of the Soviet team with them. When the Soviet players played together, they played as a single unit. They used their skill within a system. They perfected that system and used it to dominate their sport like no other team has ever done. “You didn’t have to see your line mate. You could smell him,” said Igor Larionov. “We could have played blindfolded.”