ZURICH – Sixteen years after three Swedes were the first ones to earn the exclusive membership, the Triple Gold Club has grown to include 22 players. They will be ceremonially inducted on February 22 in Vancouver.

The IIHF.com Olympic Page highlights 100 Days Left by announcing the ceremonial induction of the 22 players who have won the Olympic gold, the IIHF World Championship and the Stanley Cup to the Triple Gold Club.

The induction ceremony for the Triple Gold Club will take place on February 22, 2010, on the off-day of the men’s tournament, one day before the start of the play-off round. The projected venue of the unique ceremony is the Molson Canadian Hockey House, which will be located just next to the Canada Hockey Place, the main venue of the Olympic ice hockey tournament.

The Triple Gold Club ceremony is a joint effort by the IIHF, the NHL and the NHLPA.

It was sixteen years ago, at the 1994 Olympic Winter Games in Lillehammer, Norway, that Swedes Tomas Jonsson, Mats Näslund and Håkan Loob became the first three players to complete the triple which included the three major team accomplishments in hockey.

Since then, the Triple Gold Club has grown to include 22 players from four nations. Sweden tops with nine members, Russia has six, Canada five and the Czech Republic two. Click here to find out who the 22 TGC members are, when they won the three different championships and on what date they completed the elusive triple.

Elusive is a fitting word to describe the challenge to win all three titles. Consider this:

More than 15,000 players have tried to win World Championship gold since 1930.
More than 9,000 players have tried to win the Stanley Cup since 1893.
More than 4,000 players have tried to win Olympic gold since 1920.
Only 22 players have won all three.

Out of the 22, ten are retired. Out of the twelve active players up to ten are considered to have a probable chance to play for their respective country at the Vancouver Olympics. Nine of the active TGC-members play in the NHL, one in the KHL (Jaromir Jagr), one in the Czech Extraliga (Jiri Slegr) and one player doesn’t have a club affiliation at the time of this announcement (Peter Forsberg).

The club currently consists of 12 forwards and ten defencemen. Still, no goaltender has been successful in completing the triple.

FOOTNOTE: The Triple Gold Club only accepts members who have won the three titles in separate competitions. Earlier, many of the Olympic Games also counted as IIHF World Championships. Any “doubles” accomplished in those events are not counted towards the Triple Gold Club.