Ice hockey: Comment: Swiss hockey no longer has any morals

Eight Canadian national junior team players, in 2018, gang-abused and gang-raped an intoxicated young woman. The charges were initially dropped, for the simple and good reason that the Canadian Federation – “Hockey Canada” – had a war chest to stifle “this kind of problem”.

The Federation – and its army of powerful lawyers quick to humiliate and crush weak victims – bought the silence of the young woman. The players involved got away with it without a scratch…until the case was reopened last summer after revelations about the shameful and outrageous practices of ‘Hockey Canada’. A new investigation is underway.

All these players now benefit from the presumption of innocence. Including Alex Formenton, a talented forward that all NHL clubs without exception would not even touch with a three-meter hockey stick, but whom Ambri “had the pleasure” (in the words of the press release) to hire until Tuesday. at the end of the season, certainly in the hope of winning one or two more matches this winter. Like money, victory definitely has no smell.

A few weeks earlier in the Swiss League, Visp had opened the door to a first Canadian player with a troubled past, Jake Virtanen (but for another case, now closed, which was not at all linked to the Hockey Canada scandal in 2018).

When the 2018 case – the one that concerns Alex Formenton – was reopened, many players who were part of the Canadian team at the time published (probably on the advice of their lawyers) an official press release to publicly declare that they were either not involved in the alleged facts at all and/or to say that they were cooperating fully with the police investigation until its conclusion. The vice has at the same time tightened on the others…

A detail: Alex Formenton is one of the few players who have not, to date, issued the slightest position.

Sooner or later, the eight Canadian players – for now presumed innocent – ​​involved in this gang rape of 2018 will have only two possible places of departure to pursue their careers: Russia and, unfortunately, Switzerland, where their past, murky as it is, ultimately doesn’t seem to bother anyone, not even the sponsors.

Among the dozens of players available on the transfer market, Ambri thus rushed on Alex Formenton thinking that a press release in which the club clears its conscience and clears customs in advance, just in case, I quote:  » if the new investigation by the Canadian police reveals elements unknown to date, the club and the player reserve the right to reassess their contractual relationship.

This signature is a shame for Swiss hockey.

And the commitment of this player, although presumed innocent, is an affront to all female hockey fans, in a country, Switzerland, where more than one in five women has already been the victim of sexual abuse (statistics of 2019, Amnesty International).