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Paul Wiecek
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Giddy-up... Downs not out
There will be eight races and eight winners when Assiniboia Downs opens its 2013 live thoroughbred racing season with their first card of the year Sunday afternoon. But the most important race is already running -- and the Manitoba Jockey Club appears to be in the lead and rapidly drawing away.View Full Column | 05/3/2013 1:00 AM | 0
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Tebow not our type
Is Tim Tebow the long-term quarterback solution Winnipeg Blue Bombers fans have been waiting on for a decade now? Probably not. And not just because the Montreal Alouettes hold the CFL negotiating rights to the quirky American QB, who was released by the NFL's New York Jets on Monday morning.View Full Column | 04/30/2013 1:00 AM | 0
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Blue's brainy brother act
On the long list of things Winnipeg GM Joe Mack needs to get right this season, near the top is figuring out a way to lock down linebacker Henoc Muamba as a Blue Bomber for years to come. Muamba, the first-overall pick in the 2011 CFL entry draft, had by any statistical measure you'd care to use a breakout season in 2012.View Full Column | 04/26/2013 1:00 AM | 0
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The good news? It could have been worse
It was never going to be pretty, not after a year that saw the Winnipeg Blue Bombers' on-field operations do battle with the team's off-field operations in the Futility Bowl. But until the release on Tuesday of the club's 2012 annual report, nobody could be certain exactly what the sum of a 6-12 season and operating two stadiums at the same time would equal in the ugly column.View Full Column | 04/24/2013 1:00 AM | 0
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Bombers are no tweets
The Twitterverse is a living, breathing organism. And just like the people who populate it, there are times when it behaves in strange and mysterious ways. Like Thursday, for instance, when it suddenly erupted, apropos of nothing, with all kinds of tweets -- most of them emanating from Calgary -- that the Winnipeg Blue Bombers and Calgary Stampeders are in negotiations that would see Calgary QB Kevin Glenn shipped to Winnipeg in exchange for the Bombers' second overall draft pick next month.View Full Column | 04/19/2013 9:25 AM | 0
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New TV deal big win for Buchko
Not a lot has gone right for Garth Buchko since he took over as CEO of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers last winter. Until Thursday.View Full Column | 03/22/2013 1:00 AM | 0
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Bombers ecstatic over new digs at Investors Group Field
The hot tub is big enough to swim in -- literally. The locker and training rooms rival those in the NFL.View Full Column | 03/21/2013 1:51 PM | 0
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Looking for big score
Only an incurable optimist would look back on the debacle that was the 2012 Winnipeg Blue Bombers season and say, "Yeah, but how about that second overall draft pick they picked up?" It was cold comfort for Bombers fans last November when their club's season ended prematurely -- out of the playoffs, for the third time in four years -- that Winnipeg's 6-12 regular-season record came with the small silver lining of the second overall pick in May's 2013 CFL entry draft.View Full Column | 03/19/2013 1:00 AM | 0
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Blue GM defends absence of action
Winnipeg Blue Bombers general manager Joe Mack offered a spirited defence of his handling of the current off-season on Friday, answering critics who think he hasn't done enough to improve a team that finished 6-12 in 2012 and missed the playoffs for the third time in four seasons. Mack has been taking fire since free agency began on Feb. 15 for his continuing refusal to aggressively pursue free agents, even as East Division rivals in Montreal and especially Hamilton have gone hard in the past month to improve their squads.View Full Column | 03/16/2013 1:00 AM | 0
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Northern Ontario hot
EDMONTON -- The way Brad Jacobs and his Northern Ontario team were playing here the last few days, Jeff Stoughton probably wasn't going to beat him in the Brier final anyway. But then the game started and Stoughton promptly -- and personally -- removed all doubt.View Full Column | 03/11/2013 1:00 AM | 0
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Stoughton would ignore odd heckling rule
EDMONTON -- Picture this: It's Friday night at the Brier, an extra end between Manitoba and B.C. and Jeff Stoughton climbs into the hack, needing to draw the full eight-foot with the final rock to clinch second place for his team and simultaenously eliminate a red-hot Alberta team that had just moments earlier won their sixth game in a row over previously undefeated Ontario to keep the hometown team's slim playoff hopes alive.View Full Column | 03/10/2013 1:00 AM | 0
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Strong Trials field taking shape
EDMONTON -- With only a handful of curling events still remaining to be played this winter -- including the final four days of the Canadian men's curling championship here at Rexall Place -- the field for next December's Tim Hortons Canadian Curling Trials at the MTS Centre is coming into sharper focus. While there are still just six teams with their Trials tickets confirmed for Winnipeg, there are another six teams who are now on the verge of clinching their berths into the 16-team Trials, at which eight men's and eight women's teams will compete to determine Canada's curling representatives for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.View Full Column | 03/7/2013 1:00 AM | 0
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Gushue stocks Brier with excellent curlers
EDMONTON -- Brad Gushue has a pretty good team at the Canadian men's curling championship. And he has a second, even better team that he's not playing with. There is, on the one hand, the team who joined Gushue in the colours of Team Newfoundland Saturday on opening day at Rexall Place -- third Brett Gallant, second Adam Casey and lead Geoff Walker.View Full Column | 03/3/2013 1:00 AM | 0
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Into the fire
EDMONTON -- Jeff Stoughton says he's ready to go. He'd better be.View Full Column | 03/2/2013 1:00 AM | 0
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New face of women's curling
K INGSTON, ONT. -- The guard doesn't change very often in curling. But it sure appears like it did exactly that on the final weekend of the Canadian women's curling championship. And it wasn't the changing of the guard that Manitoba's Jennifer Jones was hoping would take place when she decided following the 2010 season to jettison veteran third Cathy Overton-Clapham in favour of a hot young shooter named Kaitlyn Lawes.View Full Column | 02/25/2013 1:00 AM | 0
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Zero-100 in record time
KINGSTON, ONT. -- And with that, the measure of Jennifer Jones's success at the Canadian women's curling championship is now tabulated in triple digits. With her 100th career victory at a Canadian women's curling championship Friday, Jones officially joined a club that until Friday had just one other member -- Nova Scotia's Colleen Jones.View Full Column | 02/23/2013 1:00 AM | 0
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Jones schools young Ontarian
KINGSTON, ONT. -- Manitoba's Jennifer Jones will head into the final day of the round robin today at the Canadian women's curling championship with not much more to be determined than maybe a little slice of Canadian curling history. With a pair of wins Thursday -- a 9-7 thriller over Ontario's Rachel Homan in the morning and a 7-1 shellacking of Quebec's Allison Ross Thursday night -- Jones improved to a perfect 9-0 and has now clinched a spot in Saturday's coveted Page playoff 1 vs. 2 game, where the winner advances directly to Sunday's final while the loser gets a second chance in the semifinal.View Full Column | 02/22/2013 1:00 AM | 0
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Oly wrestlers not amused as they're out, curling is in
KINGSTON, ONT. -- It didn't take long for the shrapnel from last week's IOC bombshell that wrestling was being stripped of its Olympic status to strike the sport of curling. What does curling's status as a Winter Olympics sport have to do with wrestling losing its status as a sport in the Summer Olympics?View Full Column | 02/20/2013 1:00 AM | 0
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Shadows of former champs curl on
KINGSTON -- It's like watching a grand old thoroughbred take to the racetrack one too many times. The fire is still there -- that never leaves, you can see it in their eyes. And there are still glimpses of what horse-racing people refer to as 'back-class' -- those fleeting little moments that reveal this was once a champion who competed at the very highest levels.View Full Column | 02/19/2013 1:00 AM | 0
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Bizarre if Jones not in final
KINGSTON, Ont. -- She comes into this event as the undisputed skip to beat. But make no mistake, Jennifer Jones can be beaten.View Full Column | 02/16/2013 3:25 AM | 0
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Stoughton hangs 10 in Neepawa
NEEPAWA -- There seem to be two primary reasons why Jeff Stoughton wins the final game of the Manitoba men's curling championship like no one before him -- no one even close, in fact -- in the long and glorious curling history of this province. First, no one in the Manitoba men's game ever -- and rivalled only by Jennifer Jones in the women's game -- is better under pressure and in the big game.View Full Column | 02/11/2013 1:00 AM | 0
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Blue lose QB option with Reilly an Eskimo
B.C. Lions backup QB Mike Reilly was perceived to be the best option available to the Winnipeg Blue Bombers as they went in search of a long-term solution to their quarterbacking woes. And now that Reilly has signed instead with the Edmonton Eskimos, the options remaining to the Bombers -- and there aren't many -- are decidedly less attractive.View Full Column | 02/1/2013 1:00 AM | 0
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Dreamin' of Tebow in Blue& Gold?
You'd think it would be a simple enough question to answer: Will veteran Winnipeg Blue Bombers quarterback Buck Pierce be in training camp to compete for the starting job in June?View Full Column | 01/18/2013 1:00 AM | 0
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High-stakes showdown
Canadian curling will make history this week. With TSN deciding to televise every draw of this week's Canada Cup of Curling from Moose Jaw, the Canadian Curling Association's marquee cash spiel will for the first time receive the same blanket TV coverage on a main network as Canadians are used to seeing from national and international curling championships.View Full Column | 11/28/2012 1:00 AM | 0
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100th Grey Cup a 50-50 proposition
The numbers jump off the page and tell a story of parity that almost seems too tidy to be true. Consider: There have been 67 Grey Cups held since the CFL returned to its traditional East-West format following the Second World War.View Full Column | 11/24/2012 1:00 AM | 0
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