From the arrest, and release, of world No. 1 golfer Scottie Scheffler before the second round of the PGA Championship, to Caitlin Clark’s WNBA debut, to any number of impressive (Summer McIntosh’s medal haul) or embarrassing (Canada soccer spying scandal) accomplishments at the Paris Olympics, there are many sports moments that stand out when looking through 2024’s rear-view mirror. From the PWHL’s Battle on Bay Street to Phil Wizard’s closing act at the Games, here are some moments from an action-packed year that resonated with The Globe and Mail’s Sports Department.
Battle on Bay Street in PWHL’s debut season
I covered the Paris Olympics last summer, watching Canada’s hammer throwers make history, the upset-minded women’s rugby 7s team earn a silver medal and Andre De Grasse anchor the men’s 4x100 team to a stunning relay gold – all enthralling scenes. Yet, my top moment was a cold Toronto night last Feb. 16. That’s when the Toronto and Montreal teams of the Professional Women’s Hockey League – then just seven weeks old – faced off at the NHL-sized Scotiabank Arena. Months earlier, few would have believed the fledgling league could command a rink that size. Yet tickets sold out in minutes. The crowd of 19,285 who turned up for the Battle on Bay Street smashed the attendance record for a women’s hockey game (one they’d eclipse again later that year). I walked around the rink talking to people in suites and stands and in the press box. I saw rows of girls in their team jerseys, a sea of bright-coloured minor-hockey crests, rainbow flags, dads and daughters, couples in matching Toronto jerseys, and groups of older women sporting their faded, decades-old hockey jackets and beer-league sweaters. Suites were spotted with VIPs, from sports executives to NHL players and Olympic medalists. When Jesse Compher scored the night’s first goal in Toronto’s 3-0 win, it felt like the roof might burst open from the noise. The team’s goal song blared and was apt, Applause by a commanding Lady Gaga. After years of women’s hockey leagues that didn’t survive, it seemed that night that the PWHL was different. With all the best players in one league, supported by patient, well-resourced owners, this league had captivated people. In 2024, with the growth of women’s sports booming around the world, it was built at just the right time. – Rachel Brady
Canada plays Argentina at the Copa America
Entering 2024, the only time the Canadian men had pitted wits against Argentina in the world’s game was 14 years ago. That result was as one-sided as many might have predicted, with the South Americans strolling to a 5-0 rout in Buenos Aires. And their lineup didn’t even feature Lionel Messi. So it was with a mixture of fear and trepidation that Canada took the pitch against the eight-time Ballon d’Or winner and the world champions last June for the opening match of Copa America, and no amount of advance scouting – legal or otherwise – was going to assuage those nerves. After all, new head coach Jesse Marsch had barely been in charge a month, and his team had yet to score a goal, let alone win a match. After the first 45 minutes in Atlanta, his team still hadn’t found the back of the net, but neither had Argentina. Though Canada would eventually lose 2-0, Les Rouges had performed with credit – “a very complicated opponent,” was how Argentina head coach Lionel Scaloni described the Canadian team. By the end of the tournament – following another 2-0 loss to Messi and Co. in the semi-final – Canada would garner even more plaudits, finishing fourth following a shootout loss to Uruguay and forcing the rest of the soccer world to sit up and take notice. – Paul Attfield
Long run in the NHL playoffs
I moved into a new home in Toronto on May 1. That was during the first round of the Stanley Cup playoff series between the Maple Leafs and the Bruins. The move necessitated my taking a few days off before I returned to Boston on May 3. We all know what happened in Game 7 the following day. With the exception of a day here or there, I was gone from Toronto from then until June 26. That is 48 days. It was the first time I covered all four rounds of the Stanley Cup. It was a privilege – and absolutely exhausting. After the Maple Leafs were eliminated I was sent out west to cover the second round between the Oilers and Canucks. On the day after Edmonton won, I flew to the Alberta capital and promptly caught COVID. I placed myself into quarantine in a hotel and exited five days later when I received a negative test. I covered one game of the third round between the Oilers and Dallas Stars from my hotel room by watching on television. That is not standard operating procedure but there was no way else to do it safely. The final round was incredibly exciting. It looked as though it was going to be a romp when the Florida Panthers won the first three games. Then the Oilers won one. And another and another – and stood on the verge of NHL history. Only one team in 105 years had come back to win the Stanley Cup after it trailed 3-0. The series was the most logistically difficult in history to cover with a massive distance between the two cities – 4,818 kilometres between Sunrise, Fla., and Edmonton. Journalists fly commercially and in this case there were no direct flights. It took at least two connections and 15 to 16 hours each way. I did that three times in less than two weeks before flying back to Toronto. Of course, the Panthers edged the Oilers in Game 7. I stayed in Florida one extra day to recover by the pool. Then I was back to my new place and all of the moving boxes still to unpack. – Marty Klinkenberg
Paul Maurice celebrates a Stanley Cup win
Sure, there was a lot to resent when the Florida Panthers snuffed out the dreams of the Edmonton Oilers and their fans in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup final – the smug delight of eternal pest Matthew Tkachuk, the prolongation of a 31-year-and-counting Canadian drought – but the weary bliss on the face of head coach Paul Maurice made the defeat sting a little less. After more than three decades behind the bench, including two unsatisfying stints in Toronto and Winnipeg, he’d finally won it all, in a nail-biter that went down to the wire. As the arena thundered in celebration, the Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., native gave an on-ice interview to Sportsnet’s Kyle Bukauskas, looking into the camera and invoking the gods of hockey to pay tribute to his mother and father back in his hometown. “Hey, Dad,” he said, choking up, “your name’s going up with your heroes: Béliveau, Richard, Howe, Lindsay – Maurice.” Having dispensed with the sacred, a week later Maurice unleashed his gloriously profane side during the team’s Stanley Cup homecoming celebration at Fort Lauderdale Beach. In the official Panthers video of the event on YouTube – fittingly sponsored by Jameson whisky – the coach took centre stage in a homemade team T-shirt bearing the mugs of his two cats, Poppy and Penny, and delivered an ecstatic, expletive-filled tribute to his players, the people of Florida, and especially his wife, Michelle, for putting up with him through more than 30 years of marriage. “Understand this,” he told the crowd, in a scream that suggested he was losing his voice, “everybody that we love in this world is happy right now!” There may have been an expletive in there, too. Sure, children were present. But his joy was contagious. – Simon Houpt
Biles mania
For me, there were two iterations of the Paris Olympics – Before Biles and After Biles. Before Biles, my first on-the-ground Olympics experience had been coloured by a fire hose of negative news: the what-felt-like-hourly unravelling of Canada’s soccer spying scandal; the morning news briefing’s daily revisiting of the Chinese swimming-doping controversy; boxing’s unending soap opera; the Dutch selection of volleyball player Steven van de Velde; the Seine; the fact they wouldn’t allow me to use a glass bottle at the main press centre. There’d been plenty of good-news stories coming out of the Games, too, but Before Biles, I’d mostly been confined to the press centre as reporters came and went, so I hadn’t experienced much of what the Olympics had to offer. Then, After Biles. Tagging along with Globe reporter Robyn Doolittle, we hustled over to Bercy Arena in the late afternoon of July 30 to catch the artistic gymnastics women’s team final. It was the first time I’d witnessed a big-time gymnastics event. The enormity of the occasion dawned on me with Biles’s first attempt at the vault. The sold-out arena (capacity 20,000) went quiet as she prepared her run – even though there are other competitions on the stadium floor occurring simultaneously. So while athletes in three other events carried on, the undivided attention of the arena always turned to Biles. This was repeated the rest of the afternoon, with enormous applause each time Biles completed her attempt or routine. It was capped off by the floor exercise, the final go of the day, which she nailed and thus sealed gold for the Americans. It was an incredible moment to witness and the pessimism that clouded my early Paris experience began to lift. – Jamie Ross
The TV call of the men’s 4x100-metre relay final
The Paris Olympics were full of huge moments for Canada, but perhaps none was more exciting than when CBC announcer Mark Lee captured the edge-of-the-seat thrill of a signature track event – the men’s 4x100-metre relay final. The great Andre De Grasse – who was limping earlier in the week – was anchor, but few Canadians expected a positive outcome. Lee started his call softly and slowly, like a boxer sizing up the opponent. “Canada up in Lane No. 9. The final of the men’s four- by 100-metre relay in Paris.” And then crack, the starter’s gun: “And they’re away! Christian Coleman attacking that opening bend. … Out front for Canada … Aaron Brown is holding off the Chinese, a good exchange!” By now, Canadian viewers on that Aug. 9 afternoon could sense something big was happening by the way Lee’s voice was becoming more rapid, more urgent, his sentences strewn with exclamation marks: “The Americans having trouble on that exchange! Down the back straight the Canadians storm … and Blake to Rodney … and Rodney has a great gap now on the Chinese! The Canadians so efficient … handing off to De Grasse. De Grasse has a chance here! De Grasse in the lead! Down the straight they go! Andre De Grasse, can he hold them off? Yes! Canada wins the gold in a massive upset here in Paris! … 37.50, a seasonal best.” It was a one-minute symphony of sprinting – fewer than 125 words of passion, tempo and rhythm – accelerando, crescendo, diminuendo. What a call. – Philip King
Phil Wizard wins gold
Getting breakdancing on the last day of the Paris Olympics was a short straw. The event goes on forever and nobody – me in particular – has any idea what’s going on. But then the weirdness began. A Japanese competitor lost to an American. The Japanese wept. The crowd booed. The American came backstage and explained the problem. “I understand the booing,” he said. “They’re booing because they don’t understand breaking.” This was different. Sports are rote. That is their nature. Every game a variation of the one that preceded it. Nothing that is new and little that is remarkable ever happening. Breakdancing at the Olympics was an exception. It appeared once and then – poof – it’s gone. Will never be staged again. So what we few got to see that day was a true one off. It went off under a withering sun in an open arena. The crowd was up for it – though most of them had no clue what was happening. They were just delighted to be there, together. The most rousing moment was a 5,000-person singalong to Johnny Hallyday’s Que je t’aime during a break. That song has about as much to do with breakdancing as a Viennese waltz. But it was getting late, and we were all in a moment of ecstatic frenzy. After a lot of literal confusion, Canada’s Phil Wizard won gold. He emerged and cried tears of joy. Not the usual this-is-nice sort, but a heaving, lifetime-of-pressure-being-released sort. The event was held in the Place de la Concord, in the heart of Paris. One emerged late that night into an absolute mob of revellers. There was a marathon going off nearby. They’d blocked off half the streets willy nilly. No one could escape. Total confusion. Total bliss. A totally unique sporting experience. – Cathal Kelly