Alex Ovechkin had been doing everything he could to compete in the Olympics for Russia, but he now admits that this dream is dead.
"I said every time I was asked since last Olympics that nobody is going to tell me I can't play because my country was going to be allowed to ask me," Ovechkin said in a statement, per Emily Kaplan of ESPN. "Now the IIHF and NHL say my country is not allowed to ask anybody in the NHL to play and there is nothing to talk about anymore."
The NHL announced in April it would not allow its players to compete in the 2018 Olympics in PyeongChang.