The International Ice Hockey Federation have confirmed that there are no plans to withdraw women's ice hockey from the Winter Olympics, despite the dominance of USA and Canada.

While the future of the NHL in the men's game has come into question recently, the IIHF president Rene Fasel has said that the women's game is coming on leaps and bounds.

"Not so," Sportingnews.com quotes Fasel as saying. "[The women's game being dropped from the Olympics] will never happen. I can guarantee that will never happen.

"I think it's much better than it was in Vancouver. We started in Vancouver with 17-0 Canada vs. Slovakia game. We have 80,000 girls playing in Canada, and we have maybe 4,000 or 4,500 playing in Finland, maybe 2,000 in Sweden and in Switzerland and Russia if we have 2,000 girls playing that would be a lot.

"It's much better, but we are not there and we can see the result."

The ice hockey tournament continues on Tuesday.