Lillehammer IK

Lillehammer Ishockeyklubb is an ice hockey club based in Lillehammer, Norway and playing in the GET-ligaen. Home games are played in Kristins Hall. Team colours are red, blue and white.

History

Founded on 2 November 1957, Lillehammer IK was a pioneer of ice hockey in the northern areas of eastern Norway. Playing under difficult conditions on natural ice for the first thirty years, success was limited to the odd foray into the second tier of the hockey league. However, they produced some fine talents, two of them brothers Arne and Lars Bergseng, who went on to become two of the best players in the first division during the 1980s.

The big break for the hockey club was Lillehammer's candidacy for the 1994 Winter Olympics. In this process the Kristins Hall hockey arena was built and opened in 1988. The city got its Olympics, and the hockey club their boost. Backed by enormous local interest they surged from the third division to the Eliteserien in only three years, but the success would not stop there. In the spring of 1994, after the Olympics was over, Lillehammer beat local rivals Storhamar Dragons in the playoff finals to claim their first, and to date only Norwegian Championship.

Lillehammer

Lillehammer (Norwegian pronunciation: [ˈlɪl̥əhɔmɔr]) is a town and municipality in Oppland county, Norway. It is part of the traditional region of Gudbrandsdal. The administrative centre of the municipality is the town of Lillehammer. As of May 2011, the population of the town of Lillehammer was 26,639. The city centre is a late 19th-century concentration of wooden houses, which enjoys a picturesque location overlooking the northern part of lake Mjøsa and the river Lågen, surrounded by mountains. Lillehammer hosted the 1994 Winter Olympics and will host the 2016 Winter Youth Olympics. Before Oslo's withdrawal from consideration, it was included as part of a bid to host events in the 2022 Winter Olympics if Oslo were to win the rights to hold the Games.

Name

The municipality (originally the parish) was named after the old Hamar (Norse Hamarr) farm, since the first church was built there. The name is identical with the word hamarr (rocky hill). To distinguish it from the nearby town and bishopric, both called Hamar, it began to be called "little Hamar": Lilþlæ Hamar and Litlihamarr, and finally Lillehammer. It is also mentioned in the Old Norse sagas as Litlikaupangr ("Little Trading Place").

Lilyhammer

Lilyhammer is a Norwegian-American television series, starring Steven Van Zandt, about a fictional New York gangster, Frank "The Fixer" Tagliano, trying to start a new life in isolated Lillehammer, Norway. The first season premiered on Norwegian NRK1 on 25 January 2012 with a record audience of 998,000 viewers (one fifth of Norway's population), and premiered on Netflix in North America on 6 February 2012, with all eight episodes available in full for streaming on the service.Lilyhammer was promoted as "the first time Netflix offered exclusive content". The spelling of the series title alludes to Lily—Tagliano's dog—killed in the first episode during an attempt on Tagliano's life, and the way Frank and some other anglophones pronounce the town's name. The series produced three seasons, with the so far final episode airing 17 December 2014. On 22 July 2015, Steven van Zandt posted on Twitter that the series had been cancelled, and the following day Netflix confirmed that they were pulling out of the series. NRK, which owns the rights to the series, remained optimistic that a deal could be made with another company for a fourth season.

1994 Winter Olympics

The 1994 Winter Olympics (Norwegian: Vinter-OL 1994), officially known as the XVII Olympic Winter Games (French: Les XVIIes Jeux olympiques d'hiver), was a winter multi-sport event celebrated from 12 to 27 February 1994 in and around Lillehammer, Norway. Lillehammer failed to win the bid for the 1992 event. Lillehammer was awarded the 1994 Winter Olympics in 1988, after beating Anchorage, United States; Östersund, Sweden; and Sofia, Bulgaria. Lillehammer is the northernmost city to ever host the Winter Games. The Games were the first to be held in a different year from the Summer Olympics, the first and only one to be held two years after the previous winter games, and the most recent to be held in a small town. The Games were the second winter event hosted in Norway, after the 1952 Winter Olympics in Oslo, and the fourth Olympics in the Nordic countries, after the 1912 Summer Olympics in Stockholm, Sweden, and the 1952 Summer Olympics in Helsinki, Finland.

While many events took place in Lillehammer, skating took place in Hamar, some ice hockey matches were placed in Gjøvik, while Alpine skiing was held in Øyer and Ringebu. Sixty-seven countries and 1,737 athletes participated in six sports and sixty-one events. Fourteen countries made their debut in the Winter Olympics, of which nine were former Soviet republics. The Games also saw the introduction of stricter qualifying rules, reducing the number of under-performing participants from warm-weather countries. New events were two new distances in short track speed skating and aerials, while speed skating was moved indoors. Nearly two million people spectated the games, which were the first to have the Olympic truce in effect. The games were succeeded by the 1994 Winter Paralympics from 10 to 19 March.