The Vancouver Whitecaps will be missing five players at the MLS is Back Tournament, including forwards Lucas Cavallini, Fredy Montero and Tosaint Ricketts.
The club said defender Andy Rose and defender/midfielder Georges Mukumbilwa are also sitting out the Florida tournament, which starts Wednesday and runs through Aug. 11.
Ricketts has a medical issue while Mukumbilwa is not cleared to leave the country. Cavallini, Montero and Rose are not taking part for personal reasons.
Cavallini, Ricketts and Rose all started in the Whitecaps’ last game, a 1-0 win over the Los Angeles Galaxy on March 7, while Montero came off the bench. Ricketts scored the game’s lone goal.
“There’s no doubt that the players that are not present are very key players and players that help the team,” coach Marc Dos Santos told a virtual conference call prior to training Tuesday night in Orlando.
“Now with that being said, it opens the door to other young players … I don’t have a doubt from what I’ve seen in training and what I’ve seen from them that we’re still going to be a hard team to beat.”
The Whitecaps’ five remaining forwards are 20-year-old Theo Bair, 21-year-old Ryan Raposo and Cristian Dajome, David Milinkovic and Yordy Reyna, all 26.
While Reyna has 19 goals in 70 MLS regular-season appearances, the other four have a combined two goals in 22 games.
Cavallini, a designated player, cited losing family members to COVID-19 in his decision not to play.
“This was an extremely difficult decision for me,” he said in a statement. “I would love to be out on the field with my teammates fighting with everything I have to play for this club and community in Orlando.
“Unfortunately COVID-19 has had a very big impact, taking away two beloved members of my family. I feel that it is best that I remain home to support my loved ones at this challenging time.”
Rose and Montero also cited family for missing out.
“My wife is due to give birth on July 17 and my original plan was to be with the team in Florida for our first and possibly second game,” said Rose, an Australian-born English defender who is also a diabetic. “However, the sacrifice of potentially missing my daughter’s birth and the risk of infection travelling home meant it didn’t make sense to go.”
Montero, a native of Colombia, cited the pandemic in making the “hard decision” to stay with his wife and daughters in Canada.
“I truly love what I do for a living and have been eagerly waiting to return to the pitch as much as anyone however the health of my family is my No. 1 priority,” he said. “My family and I have had a complicated few months not only with being isolated in Canada without family or friends but also with unforeseen health emergencies.”
The club did not detail Ricketts’ injury.
“I worked hard and was prepared to fight with my team in this tournament. unfortunately, I was not given a choice and was pulled out due to a pre-existing condition,” the Canadian international said.
Ricketts told Vancouver radio station TSN 1040 that he had been taking medication to deal with the condition.
“Everything is fine with me health-wise,” he said. “Unfortunately the pills affected my immune system and put me in a position where I’m at a much higher risk if I contract COVID.”
The club said Mukumbilwa, a Canadian resident who was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo, is not cleared to travel outside of Canada at this time. Mukumbilwa, who signed a homegrown player contract in August last year, has seen just nine minutes of action with the first team.
The withdrawals leave Vancouver with just 23 players.
Dos Santos said the club supported all five players who decided to stay at home,
“This is a tournament that is important, but it’s not life or death,” he said. “It’s not the last tournament we’ll be in. So it’s important that everybody that’s here feels good about being here.”
Vancouver opens its tournament July 15 against the San Jose Earthquakes at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex in the Orlando area.
Group B is down to three teams — Vancouver, Seattle and San Jose — with the withdrawal of FC Dallas due to 11 positive COVID-19 tests.
Whitecaps CEO and sporting director Axel Schuster says the league is trying to find a solution that would allow the teams in the group to still play three matches. The tournament’s original schedule had every team playing three group games that will count in the regular season.
Complicating the matter is the availability of fields, he added.
Vancouver Whitecaps Roster
Goalkeepers (3): Maxime Crepeau, Thomas Hasal, Bryan Meredith.
Centre Backs (4): Derek Cornelius, Erik Godoy, Jasser Khmiri, Ranko Veselinovic.
Fullbacks (3): Ali Adnan, Cristian Gutierrez, Jake Nerwinski.
Central Midfielders (8): Michael Baldisimo, Janio Bikel, Simon Colyn, Inbeom Hwang, Patrick Metcalfe, Leonard Owusu, Damiano Pecile, Russell Teibert.
Forwards (5): Theo Bair, Cristian Dajome, David Milinkovic, Ryan Raposo, Yordy Reyna.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 7, 2020.
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.
