Connor McDavid enlisted a four-legged trainer to help him stay in shape during the NHL’s coronavirus shutdown.
The Oilers captain and two-time scoring champion is working out at home in Edmonton with Lenny, his nine-month-old miniature Bernesedoodle.
On Thursday, McDavid posted a video on social media after he did 15 squats in 30 seconds with the wriggling, joyous fluffball clutched against his chest. On March 23, which was National Puppy Day, he shared a snippet from a shooting session in which a wagging Lenny ran off with one of his rubber balls.
McDavid, who has a gym in his newly built house, is better off than many of the players left idle when games were suspended on March 12. Most rely on their teams’ fitness centres and own little equipment themselves.
Along with training with Lenny, the 23-year-old has been running with teammate and pal Darnell Nurse while both keep a careful distance of two metres apart. He is also collaborating on a home-workout video for fans with former NHL player and fitness trainer Gary Roberts.
Connor McDavid’s dog, Lenny.
Courtesy of family
On Friday, McDavid joined Calgary’s Mark Giordano, Vancouver’s Bo Horvat and Arizona’s Oliver Ekman-Larsson on a video call with journalists arranged by the league. When sports screeched to a halt, all four teams were battling for playoff positions in the Pacific Division.
“It is tough,” McDavid said. “We don’t know what is going to happen with the season. We are very hopeful it is going to come back and we will be able to pick up where we left off.”
With the standings frozen, McDavid’s Oilers are in second place, three points ahead of the third-place Flames. If the remainder of the regular season is scuttled because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Alberta rivals would meet in the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs.
The Flames have won three of the four games between them, but Edmonton won the last, 8-3. The bad blood that existed when both were among the NHL’s elite teams in the 1980s has resurfaced. The Oilers goalie, Mike Smith, and his Calgary counterpart, Cam Talbot, exchanged punches in their most recent meeting.
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“We’ve had lots of meaningless games between us [since he joined the NHL] but this year has been especially wild,” McDavid said.
The NHL is considering a number of variables, but all of them depend on when the coronavirus has run its course.
“As far as the break, if we can get back to playing, I think this will be one of the greatest playoffs ever because every team is going to have all their guys healthy and ready to go,” said Giordano, the Flames’ captain. “You are truly going to have the best version of every team.”
McDavid, who suffered a serious knee injury in the final game of the 2018-19 regular season, is second in the league in scoring with 97 points. He trails only his teammate Leon Draisaitl, who is first with 110. Edmonton trailed the first-place Vegas Golden Knights by only three points when a break was declared because of the spread of the dangerous flu-like illness, and was on the verge of reaching the postseason for only the second time in 13 years.
“It is very frustrating, but there are is a lot more important stuff going on,” McDavid said. “The health and safety of everyone is what’s important. Hockey can go on hold for a little bit.
“It is important that everyone does what they have to do and takes care of each other so we can get this over with and get back to playing hockey.”
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Vancouver and Arizona could possibly miss the playoffs if the rest of the regular season is cancelled. McDavid said he would hate for that to happen, even if provided automatic entry into the Stanley Cup playoffs for his own team.
“We need to have a fair season, and a fair season is a full season,” he said. “I don’t think we can just step into the playoffs and Game 1 with Calgary in Edmonton and guys running around killing each other without having played for two months.”
Although he comes from Newmarket, a suburb north of Toronto, McDavid decided to stay in Edmonton rather than join his family.
“I thought it was safest to stay put,” he said. “I didn’t want to travel through the airport.”
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.
