Canadian Football Hall of Famer Hank Ilesic said he “absolutely” will continue to call himself a former Edmonton Eskimo even though the CFL franchise is retiring the longtime team name.
Ilesic, who joined the team as a punter in 1977 and helped Edmonton win five straight Grey Cups from 1978-’82, said his reaction to the news Tuesday was “very mixed.” The Edmonton native added that he felt the name was a tribute to the tough, hard-working people in the north that was in no way derogatory, negative or racist.
“Anybody who has put that green and gold jersey on, has put that Edmonton Eskimo helmet on, we have a saying,” Ilesic said. “You may have heard this before: ‘Once an Eskimo, always an Eskimo.’ Period. No matter what tomorrow brings and that’s fact. You can ask any player and they’ll tell you that.”
Critics say that Eskimo is a derogatory, colonial-era term for Inuit. The club said it has begun an engagement process on a new name and will use Edmonton Football Team and EE Football team in the meantime.
WATCH | Edmonton CFL team to change name:
The Edmonton CFL team will stop using “Eskimo” in its team name after criticism that it was insensitive and racist. 2:03
The change was announced Tuesday as pressure builds on pro sports teams to eliminate racist or stereotypical names.
In Major League Baseball, Cleveland Indians players met Tuesday with owner Paul Dolan to discuss a potential name change for the team. The Indians’ move coincided with the recent decision by Washington’s NFL team to stop using a derogatory term for Native Americans.
Boston Pizza recently ended its sponsorship of Edmonton’s CFL team. Belairdirect had announced it was rethinking its relationship with the club and other sponsors said they’d welcome a review of the name.
“When you get pressure from your sponsors, I guess you have to try to appease everyone involved to some degree,” Ilesic said from Orillia, Ont. “You have to. But the history of the Edmonton Eskimos will never change. Nobody can take that away from that organization, no matter what the name will be changed to.”
The team announced in February that it was keeping the name following year-long research that involved Inuit leaders and community members across Canada. The club said it received “no consensus” during that review.
WATCH | The factors leading to the Edmonton’s name change:
The Edmonton Football Club will discontinue the use of the word “Eskimo” in the team’s name 4:53
Earlier this month, Edmonton promised to speed up another review of its name. In that statement, the club noted “a lot has happened” since February.
“When I look at memorabilia, team pictures, my jersey, my helmets and the Grey Cup and all those points of identification of what the team used to be called, I don’t think that’s ever going to leave,” said former Edmonton running back Neil Lumsden. “I think there’s a footnote that the name is going to be changed … probably moving forward that’s the way history will show it.”
There have been repeated calls in recent years for the franchise to drop the name. In 2015, Canada’s national Inuit organization said it was time for a change.
Lumsden, who won three Grey Cups in Edmonton and was the top Canadian in the 1981 championship game, said he understands why the decision was made.
“Listening to the conversations and reading the articles and the commentaries around it, it really makes you sit down and think, as all of this should,” the Hall of Famer said from St. Catharines, Ont. “I have the greatest respect for the football team, what it represented to me, my teammates and my family. But I never looked at it in that way — whether it was the Edmonton Football Club, the Edmonton Eskimos, the green and gold, that’s who we were professionally.
“But I would guess close to, if not 100 per cent of the players at the time and even after that, if there was a suggestion that the Eskimo name was being disrespectful, we would have had a conversation. There’s no doubt in my mind. That’d be the last thing that we’d want to do is insult or disrespect by using that name inappropriately.”
The team said it hopes to keep its double-E logo and its green and gold colours.
The start of the 2020 CFL season has been postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It remains unclear whether games will be played this year.
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.
