When Bianca Andreescu made her run to two prestigious tennis titles–a run carried in real time on television screens across the country late in the summer of 2019–she pretty much made picking last year’s Canada’s athlete of the year the proverbial piece of cake for the sporting media.
Picking this year’s winner of the Lou Marsh Trophy was never going to be easy.
And it wasn’t:
- The Summer Olympics in Tokyo were postponed.
- Hockey and basketball shut down in March, save for what the NHL and the NBA tried to sell as playoffs in the late summer and fall, taking place in bubbles to combat COVID-19.
- The Toronto Blue Jays played their home games in Buffalo, N.Y., 100 kilometres–and a lifetime away–for Canadian sports fans.
- The Canadian Football League never got out of the starting gate.
So the number of Lou Marsh candidates–to understate–was slim.
But a winner–make that winners–we now have.
One played football in Kansas City, Missouri; the other played soccer in Munich, Germany.
Unlike Andreescu, neither commanded a great deal of the sporting media spotlight across the country.
Which is not to say that Kansas City Chiefs offensive lineman Laurent Duvernay-Tardif and Bayern Munich fullback Alphonso Davies are undeserving of the 2020 Lou Marsh Trophy, which they now share.
In 2020 each was a member of a championship team, which–from my personal experience as a sportswriter–is something most athletes will tell you is way more important that any individual honour.
Laurent Duvernay-Tardif poses next to an ice sculpture of the Super Bowl’s Vince Lombardi trophy during an event in Montrea on Feb. 9 to celebrate his win. Duvernay-Tardif, who spent eight years getting his medical degree, announced in July that he was stepping back from football to join the the fight against COVID-19 in his native Quebec and to study public health at Harvard. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham Hughes)
Duvernay-Tardif played for the Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs, becoming the 12th Canadian to win a Super Bowl.
Davies became the first male Canadian international to lift a UEFA Champions League trophy.
Neither has come up short during this current award season.
On Sunday, the 29-year-old Duvernay-Tardif, who lives in Montreal, was one of five athletes the U.S. magazine Sports Illustrated honoured as “Sportsperson of the Year: The Activist Athlete”.
His decision to forgo tens of thousands of dollars–and his reasons for doing so–won him tens of thousands of admirers across Canada, including, it would appear, members of the media who vote on awards.
Meanwhile, the 20-year-old Davies, who was born in a refugee camp in Ghana and moved to Canada at the age of five with his parents and now lives in Edmonton, was making his presence felt on the soccer pitches of Europe.
Alphonso Davies celebrates with the trophy after helping Bayern Munich defeat Paris Saint-Germain in the UEFA Champions League final on Aug. 23. (Getty Images/Miguel A. Lopes)
He was named Bundesliga rookie of the year in voting by fans, clubs and the media.
Last week, the sports network ESPN ranked him as the second-best left fullback in the world, behind Liverpool’s Andy Robertson,
His play helped Bayern Munich win five trophies this season.
Last week, he won his second Canadian Men’s Player of the Year award in three years.
Duvernay-Tardif and Davies each received 18 votes in the Lou Marsh balloting.
One vote each went to the other finalists–soccer players Christine Sinclair and Kadeisha Buchanan and NBA star Jamal Murray.
With files from CBC News, The Canadian Press, Reuters
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