TORONTO — Nick Arbuckle made his first CFL start in more than two years a memorable one – and rewarded starved Argonauts fans with a victory in their first home game in nearly two years.
Arbuckle threw one touchdown pass and dove in for his own to lift the Argos to a 30-23 victory over the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, in Toronto’s long-awaited return to BMO Field on Saturday.
Moments after the win, he scooped up his 15-month-old daughter Aaliyah, who wore a custom-made No. 9 Argos jersey. Aaliyah wasn’t yet born the last time her dad started a CFL game, with Calgary in 2019.
“This was the first game that my daughter’s ever been to. And we got the win,” Arbuckle said with a grin.
DaVaris Daniels scored on the reception, while D.J. Foster added a rushing touchdown for Toronto (2-1).
Darvin Adams and Rasheed Bailey had touchdown receptions for the Bombers (2-1), while Jesse Briggs scooped up a fumble and ran 83 yards in Winnipeg’s first loss of this abbreviated season.
The victory was revenge for Toronto, who dropped a 20-7 decision in Winnipeg a week earlier. It was also a fitting victory for the Argos, who hadn’t played a game at their BMO Field home for 665 lone days – not since a big 39-9 victory over Ottawa on Oct. 26, 2019. Then the global COVID-19 pandemic erased the 2020 CFL season.
“It’s great,” Argos rookie head coach Ryan Dinwiddie said. “We were happy to be playing at home, show them the new Argos, so we appreciated it.”
A smiling Argos general manager Pinball Clemons took the mic pre-game to address the sundrenched 9,866 fans in attendance on a steamy 28 C afternoon. Ontario COVID-19 guidelines allowed for 15,000 fans at the game.
“Hopefully we can get some more guys coming to our next game, and we can build off that,” Dinwiddie said. “We want to build relations with the fans . . . players are out there now shaking hands and doing those things to let them know we appreciate them.”
Arbuckle made his Argonauts debut a week earlier when Dinwiddie sent him in the second half in place of veteran McLeod Bethel-Thompson. Dinwiddie had said there was a sense of familiarity with Arbuckle, as Dinwiddie had been the quarterbacks coach in Calgary when Arbuckle played there.
The 27-year-old quarterback completed 23-of-32 pass attempts for 310 yards, with one touchdown and no interceptions.
Bombers QB Zach Collaros was 18 of 33 for 204 yards, two touchdowns and one interception.
Boris Bede booted three field goals for Toronto, from 52, 31 and 37 yards.
The tone of the game changed early in the second half when Daniels took a massive hit from Brandon Alexander that knocked his helmet off before he hit the ground. Daniels was down for several nervous minutes before he was helped off the field. Alexander was whistled for unnecessary roughness – and a 15-yard penalty – on the play.
“That changed the attitude of the offence a little bit,” Arbuckle said. “Unfortunately, we weren’t able to get going and score as many points after that as we wanted to. We were all kind of playing with a little bit of an edge and unfortunately kind of showed up in the (referee’s) whistle a few times, but we felt like we needed to protect a guy that they injured with what we felt like was a cheap shot.”
Foster scored Toronto’s first touchdown of the game, running it in from 10 yards out at 7:39 of the first to cap a 61-yard touchdown drive from Arbuckle.
Former Argos QB Collaros had a pass attempt picked off by Dexter McCoil Sr., that led to an Argos field goal that summed up the Bombers’ slow start to the game.
Bede booted two field goals in the quarter and Toronto led 13-0 to start the second quarter.
The Bombers finally got on the scoreboard when Jackson Jeffcoat batted the ball out of Arbuckle’s hands from behind. Briggs scooped up the ball and sprinted virtually unchallenged for an 83-yard touchdown at 3:14 of the second.
Winnipeg pulled to within 16-14 on Adams’ 51-yard touchdown catch at 12:04 of the second.
Arbuckle threw a 30-yard touchdown pass to Daniels to cap a 63-yard drive that sent Toronto into the dressing room at halftime with a 22-14 lead.
Arbuckle tossed a 31-yard pass to rookie Dejon Brissett – brother of Indiana Pacers/former Toronto Raptor power forward Oshae Brissett – that put Toronto on the one-yard line. Arbuckle muscled his way in for the touchdown at 7:55 of the third for a 29-15 lead.
The Bombers made things interesting in the final minutes when Collaros capped his 83-yard drive with a seven-yard TD pass to Bailey at 12:48 to slice the difference to seven points. But it was too little too late.
“You can tell from our demeanour right now that we’re upset about that,” Alexander said. “We laid an egg on our side. You can’t do nothing about it now, but just go back and watch film and correct a couple things. We all left a lot of plays out there, myself included.”
Bombers special teams ace Mike Miller had two tackles on the afternoon to break the CFL all-time special teams record. He now has 191, topping the 190 tackles by Jason Arakgi (2008-2016 with the B.C. Lions).
Because of COVID-19, the CFL pushed back the start of the season by nearly two months, and shortened the regular season from 18 to 14 games with no pre-season.
The Argos host the Edmonton Eskimos on Thursday, while the Blue Bombers return home to host Calgary on Aug. 29.
PARIS (AP) — French judicial authorities are investigating the disappearance of two Paralympic athletes from Congo who recently competed in the Paris Games, the prosecutor’s office in the Paris suburb of Bobigny confirmed on Thursday.
Prosecutors opened the investigation on Sept. 7, after members of the athletes’ delegation warned authorities of their disappearance two days before.
Le Parisien newspaper reported that shot putter Mireille Nganga and Emmanuel Grace Mouambako, a visually impaired sprinter who was accompanied by a guide, went missing on Sept. 5, along with a third person.
The athletes’ suitcases were also gone but their passports remained with the Congolese delegation, according to an official with knowledge of the investigation, who asked to remain anonymous as they were not allowed to speak publicly about the case.
The Paralympic Committee of the Democratic Republic of Congo did not respond to requests for information from The Associated Press.
Nganga — who recorded no mark in the seated javelin and shot put competitions — and Mouambako were Congo’s flag bearers at the opening ceremony of the Paralympic Games, organizers said.
An investigator gave the World Anti-Doping Agency a pass on its handling of the inflammatory case involving Chinese swimmers, but not without hammering away at the “curious” nature of WADA’s “silence” after examining Chinese actions that did not follow rules designed to safeguard global sports.
WADA on Thursday released the full decision from Eric Cottier, the Swiss investigator it appointed to analyze its handling of the case involving the 23 Chinese swimmers who remained eligible despite testing positive for performance enhancers in 2021.
In echoing wording from an interim report issued earlier this summer, Cottier said it was “reasonable” that WADA chose not to appeal the Chinese anti-doping agency’s explanation that the positives came from contamination.
“Taking into consideration the particularities of the case, (WADA) appears … to have acted in accordance with the rules it has itself laid out for anti-doping organizations,” Cottier wrote.
But peppered throughout his granular, 56-page analysis of the case was evidence and reminders of how WADA disregarded some of China’s violations of anti-doping protocols. Cottier concluded this happened more for the sake of expediency than to show favoritism toward the Chinese.
“In retrospect at least, the Agency’s silence is curious, in the face of a procedure that does not respect the fundamental rules, and its lack of reaction is surprising,” Cottier wrote of WADA’s lack of fealty to the world anti-doping code.
Travis Tygart, the CEO of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency and one of WADA’s fiercest critics, latched onto this dynamic, saying Cottier’s information “clearly shows that China did not follow the rules, and that WADA management did nothing about it.”
One of the chief complaints over the handling of this case was that neither WADA nor the Chinese gave any public notice upon learning of the positive tests for the banned heart medication Temozolomide, known as TMZ.
The athletes also were largely kept in the dark and the burden to prove their innocence was taken up by Chinese authorities, not the athletes themselves, which runs counter to what the rulebook demands.
Despite the criticisms, WADA generally welcomed the report.
“Above all, (Cottier) reiterated that WADA showed no bias towards China and that its decision not to appeal the cases was reasonable based on the evidence,” WADA director general Olivier Niggli said. “There are however certainly lessons to be learned by WADA and others from this situation.”
Tygart said “this report validates our concerns and only raises new questions that must be answered.”
Cottier expanded on doubts WADA’s own chief scientist, Olivier Rabin, had expressed over the Chinese contamination theory — snippets of which were introduced in the interim report. Rabin was wary of the idea that “a few micrograms” of TMZ found in the kitchen at the hotel where the swimmers stayed could be enough to cause the group contamination.
“Since he was not in a position to exclude the scenario of contamination with solid evidence, he saw no other solution than to accept it, even if he continued to have doubts about the reality of contamination as described by the Chinese authorities,” Cottier wrote.
Though recommendations for changes had been expected in the report, Cottier made none, instead referring to several comments he’d made earlier in the report.
Key among them were his misgivings that a case this big was largely handled in private — a breach of custom, if not the rules themselves — both while China was investigating and after the file had been forwarded to WADA. Not until the New York Times and German broadcaster ARD reported on the positives were any details revealed.
“At the very least, the extraordinary nature of the case (23 swimmers, including top-class athletes, 28 positive tests out of 60 for a banned substance of therapeutic origin, etc.), could have led to coordinated and concerted reflection within the Agency, culminating in a formal and clearly expressed decision to take no action,” the report said.
WADA’s executive committee established a working group to address two more of Cottier’s criticisms — the first involving what he said was essentially WADA’s sloppy recordkeeping and lack of formal protocol, especially in cases this complex; and the second a need to better flesh out rules for complex cases involving group contamination.
The French league’s legal commission has ordered Paris Saint-Germain to pay Kylian Mbappé the 55 million euros ($61 million) in unpaid wages that he claims he’s entitled to, the league said Thursday.
The league confirmed the decision to The Associated Press without more details, a day after the France superstar rejected a mediation offer by the commission in his dispute with his former club.
