All 8 amazing custom skates from the World Junior Championship.

The International Ice Hockey Federation's World Junior Championship took a pretty big hit yesterday when it was revealed that some of the top stars on some of the top teams in the tournament would not be participating. 

Although there is no sugar coating the fact that the news has taken some of the shine off of what is normally one of the most exciting hockey tournaments of the year, there was also some pretty exciting news that leaked out on Friday regarding the tournament as well. Although in the case the news did not come from an official source, a report from TSN's Bardown revealed on Friday that the custom skates designs for the countries participating in these tournaments had been leaked. 

As a result of these leaks we got to see 8 brand new skates, one for each of the countries represented in Canada, the United States of America,  Sweden, Finland, Germany, Russia, the Czech Republic and Norway. I have to admit the design of these things is pretty damn awesome and if Bauer plans on marketing these bad boys after the tournament has concluded I suspect that they will be selling quite a few pairs to hockey players young and old alike who want to display their patriotism on their hockey gear.

Now I've seen some criticism of the design on the skate produced for the American team, with the criticism seemingly entirely focused on the fact that the flag on the skate appears to be displayed "backwards." This was actually done quite intentionally and was not in fact some major oversight by the people at Bauer, which makes sense considering these things no doubt go through dozens of iterations before they are greenlit for production. Instead the flag with the stars facing forward is actually a traditional symbol of the American armed forces. In the armed forces the rule is that the blue field of stars should always be in the highest position of honor on the uniform, and that position has always been the right shoulder with the flag's blue stars facing forward hence the reason for the design of these skates.

Check them all out below, they are pretty awesome.