Yoko Kondo, Japan Return To Women's Olympic Hockey

This is Yoko Kondo. She's a defender with the Seibu Princess Rabbits of the Japan Women's Ice Hockey League.

And as Japan's women's national team team returns to the Olympics in 2014 for the first time since the country hosted the 1998 Games, Kondo is the only member of the Japanese team with Olympic hockey experience.

Oh, and she's switched to forward for Sochi.

Kondo started playing at the age of six, mostly because her older brother played. The office worker has also competed in four top-level women's world hockey championships between 2001 and 2013.

The veteran has seen women's hockey grow in Japan.

“We weren’t at a level capable of winning against foreign teams [at the Nagano Games]. We didn’t have a clear goal, either,” Kondo said in a brief interview with The Japan News.

“It’s totally different now. Now we have a clear strategy to win a medal.”

One of the strategies is to move the experienced Kondo to forward where she can use her size and savvy hopefully to score a few goals. The experiment only started in December so Kondo says she "feels like a rookie again."

Catching Up With Long Forgotten Women's Hockey Legend

The Japanese women's hockey team recently qualified for the 2014 Winter Olympics. According to Andria Hunter's Women's Hockey Web women's hockey in Japan dates back to 1973. The only other time the Japanese ladies competed at the Olympics was in 1998 when they hosted the games in Nagano.

IIHF.com recently caught up with Tamae Satsu, the unlikely women's all star goalie way back in the 1990 Women's World Hockey Championships:

One of the two goalies on the team was Tamae Satsu, and despite the fact that she let in 17 goals in four games and 151:00 of action, she was named to the end of tournament all-star team.

“I brought one thing home with me that was very important and most memorable,” Satsu recalled from her home in Seattle, Washington. “I was named to the all-star team and was given a bathrobe embroidered with “all-star” on it. It was pretty special because the forwards on the all-star team were from Canada, Finland, and U.S. The defence was Canada and U.S. And then I’m the goalie!”

Her inclusion was not surprising. “The shots were always 60 or 70 to 2, so at the end of every game I was just really exhausted,” she said with a laugh 23 years later.

Women's hockey has come a long, long ways since that inaugural world championships. Here's the full article.