Latest news with #KingCity
Yahoo
23-06-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Canada cricketers celebrate T20 World Cup qualification with win over Bermuda
KING CITY — Teenage batsman Yuvraj Samra scored 45 runs Sunday as Canada celebrated qualification for next year's ICC Men's T20 World Cup with a six-wicket win over Bermuda in the final game of the four-country Americas Qualifier. Canada's seven-wicket win over the Bahamas on Saturday, coupled with Bermuda's nine-wicket loss to the Cayman Islands, sealed the Canadian qualification on the penultimate day of the four-team qualifier. Advertisement Sunday's win, which improved Canada's tournament record to 6-0-0, was icing on the qualifying cake. "It's a great feeling," captain Nicholas Kirton said of qualification. "Obviously we were there a year ago, so it's good to be preparing for that again. "Playing with a team like that, obviously it's easy to get into the winning habit. It's just to keep doing the basics right and hopefully we can continue." Canada made its T20 World Cup debut last year, failing to advance out of the group stage after beating No. 11 Ireland and losing to No. 8 Pakistan and co-host United States, ranked 17th. A match against No. 1 India was abandoned because of inclement weather. Advertisement Bermuda won the toss Sunday and elected to bat at the Maple Leaf Cricket Ground where it was 32 C feeling like a steamy 39 C for the mid-afternoon start. After a storming inning of 70 runs by No. 3 batsman Delray Rawlins, Bermuda's batting order crumbled. Bermuda finished at 131 all out midway through the 19th over. That set Canada a victory target of 132 from its 20 overs. Canada put up its half-century in the fifth over with Samra accounting for 40 of the runs. But the 18-year-old was bowled by Dominic Sabir in the sixth over with Canada at 63 for one. Samra finished with three sixes and five fours in his 23-ball knock. Fellow opener Dilpreet Bajwa was caught two balls later on 12 runs off 10 deliveries. And Pargat Singh was run out the next over with Canada at 65 for three. Advertisement The Canadians were 85 for three after 10 overs. Harsh Thaker (33 runs) and Kirton (17 runs) steered Canada over the victory line at 132 for four wickets in the 16th over. Canada is the 13th country to qualify for the 20-team T20 World Cup in February-March 2026. The other qualified sides are Afghanistan, Australia, Bangladesh, England, South Africa, the U.S., West Indies, Ireland, New Zealand and Pakistan, plus co-hosts India and Sri Lanka. Seven more teams — two from the Europe Qualifier (to be played July 5-11), two from the Africa Qualifier (Sept. 19 to Oct. 4) and three from the Asia-Pacific Qualifier (Oct. 1-17) — will book their ticket through regional qualifiers. Canada defeated Bermuda by 110 runs in its June 15 opening match at the Americas Qualifier. Advertisement Bermuda was 100 for two after 10 overs Sunday, before losing the next eight wickets for just 31 runs. Rawlins' fine innings ended when he was caught at the boundary by Shivam Sharma off Saad Bin Zafar's last delivery of the 11th over with Bermuda at 102 for three. Kaleem Sana and Zafar each took three wickets. Zafar was named player of the match, conceding just 10 runs in his four overs. Sharma was named best bowler of the tournament after taking 11 wickets, while Jermaine Baker of the Cayman Islands, with 311 runs, was named best batsman and tournament MVP. Sana removed Bermuda opener Tre Manders with Canada's first ball. But Rawlins, the No. 3 batsman, came out swinging, scoring 14 balls off Dilon Heyliger's first three deliveries of a third over that produced 16 runs for Bermuda. Advertisement Rawlins punished Jaskaran Buttar in the fourth over, with 10 runs of his first two deliveries of a 14-run over. And Rawlins attacked the spin of Thaker the next over, reaching his half-century with a four-six-four off the first three balls. Canada had a slight chance to remove Rawlins on 64 in the eighth over but a diving Singh was unable to get to a moonshot when it came down. Rawlins and Alex Dore put on an 83-run partnership before Dore, on six, was caught by Zafar off Buttar's last delivery of the eighth over. The 27-year-old Rawlins, who made his debut for Bermuda at 15 and went on to make 138 appearances for Sussex in England, slammed six sixes and four fours in his 42-ball knock. Onias Bascome added 20 runs. Canada, the Bahamas, Bermuda and Cayman Islands were competing in an eight-day, double round-robin format that sent the tournament winner to the T20 World Cup. Advertisement Canada is ranked 19th in T20 play by the International Cricket Council, compared to No. 27 for Bermuda, No. 41 for the Cayman Islands and No. 56 for the Bahamas. The Cayman Islands and Bahamas were recently promoted from the Subregional Qualifier. This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 22, 2025. The Canadian Press
Yahoo
22-06-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Canadian cricketers win second game in a row at ICC Men's T20 World Cup qualifier
KING CITY — Kanwarpal Tathgur scored 53 not out as Canada defeated the Cayman Islands by 59 runs Monday for its second win in as many matches at the Americas Qualifier for the ICC Men's T20 World Cup 2026. The Canadian men downed Bermuda by 110 runs Sunday. Advertisement The Caymans won the toss at the Maple Leaf Cricket Ground and elected to field Monday. Canada finished at 162 for five in its allotted 20 overs with the Caymans restricted to 103 for nine in response. Canada, the Bahamas, Bermuda and Cayman Islands are competing in an eight-day double round-robin format that will see the group winner advance to next year's ICC Men's T20 World Cup. Canada made its T20 World Cup debut last year, failing to advance out of the group stage after beating Ireland and losing to Pakistan and co-host U.S. A match against India was abandoned due to inclement weather. Canadian opener Aaron Johnson did not make it out of the first over Monday, failing to score before being caught with just two runs on the board. No. 3 batsman Pargat Singh was out leg before wicket for one run, lasting just two balls. Advertisement Opener Yuvraj Samra and captain Nicholas Kirton put on a 47-run partnership, with Samra finishing on 28 runs and Kirton on 42. Tathgur hit four fours and two sixes in his 32-ball knock. Openers Jermaine Baker and Akshay Naidoo led the Cayman Islands with 30 and 24 runs, respectively. There was little resistance further down the batting order, however, with the Caymans crumbling from 70 for two to 97 for nine. Shivam Sharma led the Canadian bowlers with three wickets. Canada faces the Bahamas on Wednesday, Cayman Islands on Thursday, Bahamas on Saturday and Bermuda next Sunday. The Cayman Islands and Bahamas were recently promoted from the Subregional Qualifier. Advertisement Canada is ranked 19th in T20 play by the International Cricket Council, compared to No. 27 for Bermuda, No. 41 for the Cayman Islands and No. 52 for the Bahamas. --- This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 16, 2025 The Canadian Press
Yahoo
17-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Veteran horseman Tim Drake says bringing a new life into the world never gets old
KING CITY — From February through June, after a long day's work, Tim Drake might be found overnighting in a room the size of a closet at the end of the barn at Silver Duck Stable. Inside there's two battered La-Z-Boy chairs, a small TV and an array of video screens showing stalls in the barn. The no-fills nook allows the 62-year-old stable owner to be close — with an alarm set for every 30 minutes overnight to stay on point — while waiting for a mare to foal. Advertisement And when he sees telltale signs on the screen, he jumps into action. "You've got to love it. It's not something you ever get rich on. You make a living, but I do love it. I really do," said Drake. "People look at me like I'm nuts. Maybe I am." The moment the mare bonds with the foal makes it all worthwhile, however. The miracle of life and motherhood wins him over every time. "That's why I do it," he said. "I tell you as long as I've foaled mares, you'd think it'd get to be routine. It never ever does. Never ever … If that don't move you a little bit, you've got no heart." Advertisement It doesn't come easy. After starting work in the barn at 4:30 or 5 a.m., Drake catches a few hours sleep in the afternoon. Wife Suzanne, a trainer at nearby Woodbine, sometimes spells him for a few hours overnight, allowing Drake to catch a few hours sleep in the La-Z-Boy. "I go home once a day and have a shower and that's the only time I see home," said Drake. "It's a way of life. It's not really a job," he added. "That's what you live for." Jo Maglietta, the assistant farm manager, echoes that view. "It doesn't matter how many years you've done it or how may you've seem, it always is the most exhilarating experience ever," said the 42-year-old Maglietta, who has worked at Silver Duck for some 17 years. "Just to see that new life and the connection the mums and the babies make, it's really cool. It's really special." Advertisement It's that kind of devotion that prompts owners to send their mares to Silver Duck Stable. "I like to have them three weeks to a month ahead (of the due date), at least," Drake explained. "The reason is just so you can kind of get used to them, their habits and whatnot." That homework helps Drake know when a mare starts acting out of character and the foal is coming. Plus the weeks in advance of the birth allow the mare to get used to him. And it helps to be on good terms with an animal weighing 1,300 pounds in a small stall. One of Drake's loyal owners is Charles Fipke, a member of both the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame and Canadian Horse Racing Hall of Fame, who sends horses from Kentucky. But mostly he handles Ontario-bred horses these days. Advertisement Fipke, whom Drake refers to as Mr. Fipke, entrusted Drake with several mares who were pregnant by Galileo, an Irish-bred star that won the Irish Stakes and England's Epsom Derby and was named European Champion Three-Year-Old Colt of 2001. Galileo's huge stud fee did not go unnoticed at Silver Duck Stable. But Drake's down-to-earth approach soon took over. "I mean they all foal the same," he said. "A cheap horse foals the same as an expensive one. It's just when you've got one that's almost a million-dollar stud fee, it puts a little bit of pressure on you to get everything done right." In the past, Drake's stable has foaled as many as 35 in a year. This year has been more manageable with Drake and Maglietta waiting on one last mare to deliver. Advertisement When they arrives, the foals weigh between 90 and 130 pounds. A couple of years ago, they had four mares foal in a 24-hour period. "It was pretty hectic," he recalled. After foaling season is over, Drake's stable looks after horses recovering from injury or surgery. The Milton Equine Clinic, University of Guelph and the nearby King Animal Hospital all use Drake. "Surgery's important but the after-care's just as important," said Drake. He says there are more good days than bad days. But there are times when the birthing mare needs more help, prompting an emergency call to the vet and perhaps a trip to hospital. Advertisement On rare occasion, the mare may also reject the foal, necessitating the use of a surrogate mare. The stable is located on part of Kinghaven Farms, once a thriving thoroughbred racing outfit. While the Wilmot family still has some horses, its focus now is on producing honey, eggs and greenhouse lettuce on the property, Drake has had his corner of the farm for some 12 years. Silver Duck was on the former Kinghaven Farms location for some 15 years. The stable is small but functional, guarded outside by a small statue of a jockey — not to mention Brody, Daisy and Delilah — Drake's three dogs. Vets are not usually present at the birth because they can't get there in time. Drake says if all goes well, the vet gets involved the day after. Advertisement The vet adds to the tests already done by Drake. That includes checking the colostrum, the first milk produced by the mare that is rich in antibodies vital for building the foal's immune system. Drake reckons he has foaled more than 800 mares over the last 40 years or so. But he's smart enough to know there's always something new to learn. "I still see things that I've never seen before. And I guess that's what keeps your interest in." "Any time you think you know it all, they'll just make you a liar," he added with a chuckle. Drake grew up around horses in Englehart, Ont., some 540 kilometres north of Toronto. Advertisement After high school, he headed west on a one-way train ticket with $40 in his pocket. The initial job never came through and he ended up working at a gas station/car wash for $1.90 an hour. Then he got a job with the late Lord Roderic Gordon, who had thoroughbred horses. He ended up at Harlequin Ranches in Alberta under the late Richard Bonnycastle. When the stable was moved to Ontario, Drake came too. When that farm was sold, Drake turned down an offer to go to England to work and stayed in Ontario, working for Jim Day, a former equestrian champion and thoroughbred trainer, and the late Gustav Schickedanz. "I learned a lot from Jimmy. He was a pretty good horseman," said Drake. Advertisement He then opened his own stable, which at its height housed 80 or 90 horses. He chose the name Silver Duck, a nod to drake being the male duck. "We thought it would be a little extravagant wishing for gold so we thought 'Well we'll go with silver. Keep it modest,'" he said with a chuckle. His goal is simple. Make things as easy for the mare, whose pregnancy usually last 11 months and five days, and foal as possible. Once a mare's water breaks, usually the foal shows up with a half-hour. Drake has to ensure the foal comes out the right way with the front legs and head first. Advertisement If that's not the case, he literally gets hands on — and hands in — to help get the foal in the right position. Drake and helpers may then have to help pull the foal out. There are rare times when the mare rejects the foal, which in a worst-case scenario requires a nurse mare to help tend the newborn. The mare and foal will stay a few weeks at the stable for at least a few weeks before returning home. Most of the foals will end up on a racetrack. "We sure hope so. If everything goes good," said Drake. He looks beyond a horse's resume, however. Each one has a personality. "Winning a cheap race to me is just as good a feeling as winning a stakes race. It's not as lucrative but your horse got there ahead of everyone else's," he said. "And you're proud of the work that you did. You're so proud of the horse and the work that he did. Advertisement "Because it's not always the fastest horse wins the race. A horse has got to have a little bit of heart. The trainer's got to have done his job. The jockey does his or her job. The groom and the hot-walker. It's a team effort." And it starts with Drake. --- This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 16, 2025 Neil Davidson, The Canadian Press
Globe and Mail
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Globe and Mail
Hidden in plain sight
Ontario artist Derek Sullivan has no special affection for the minimalist sculpture of the 1960s and 1970s, with its unadorned surfaces and abstract geometries. And he detects some hubris in the American land art movement of the period, which inserted modernism right into the earth, producing such renowned installations as Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, Donald Judd's desert sculptures at Marfa, Texas, and Richard Serra's monumental site-specific works. 'I'm not actually a huge fan of Serra; the grandness is not how I like to work: I prefer scrappy pencil drawings,' Sullivan said. And yet here he is, on a spring morning, standing in a fallow field about 50 kilometres north of Toronto, contemplating what is probably the most celebrated but least seen example of Serra's land art. Shift, a series of six low concrete walls following the line of the rolling moraine, was erected in 1972 on private farmland owned by the Toronto developer and art collector Roger Davidson. He had invited Serra to build on his country property in King City, Ont., and the American artist came to Canada accompanied by his then-partner and collaborator, artist Joan Jonas, to build Shift. Serra, who died in 2024, was one of America's most important modernist sculptors and Shift is considered a seminal work from his early career: Sullivan was introduced to photographs of the piece as an art student at York University. Yet it is also little known and seldom seen because no one is really responsible for it. While other land art pieces are carefully preserved by art foundations or museums, Shift has been left to the elements, partly overgrown with grasses and dogwood, and occasionally dinged by a farmer's passing tractor. 'What I like about the Serra is its roughness, the fact that it's cracked, that it's scraped, that it's been allowed to age with the space. It's not maintained as a precious thing that has to be intact,' Sullivan said. 'I call this one a feral artwork. No one cares for it.' It's the relationship between the art and its changing site that really interests Sullivan, who has created a body of work about the sculpture and its unlikely setting now showing at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in nearby Kleinburg. His project extends his interest in the context in which art is made and seen: A previous piece reimagined a tall column sculpture by the Romanian modernist Constantin Brancusi, which suggested infinite height as a Toronto telephone pole covered in flyers with the potential for infinite girth. He is always interested in how art is distributed and has printed many of his own artist's books. Davidson, who died in 2005, sold his property a few years after Shift was erected and it now stands on land that belongs to Great Gulf, the builder of several local subdivisions. It's all private property, but local dog walkers and dirt bikers use the forest that leads to the field, and someone recently built a bonfire up against Shift. Meanwhile, a local farmer rotates crops, including wheat and soybean, in the field. Great Gulf has no plans to build on the site because it is a protected cultural landscape under the Ontario Heritage Act, said Kathleen Schofield, the developer's president of low-rise residential. And the surrounding land is part of the protected Oak Ridges Moraine. 'The site will remain as is for the foreseeable future,' she said in a statement provided to The Globe. When Sullivan first decided to investigate in 2021, he wasn't sure he would be able to reach Shift, thinking he would find it surrounded by subdivisions. He grew up in suburban Richmond Hill, Ont., and figured his work based on Shift would be about encroaching suburbia or blocked access to the site. Using wayfinding skills he perfected playing video games as a boy, he found the right path and emerged from the forest on a hot July day. Foliage eclipsed any sign of nearby housing while a flock of herons sat in a row on one of Shift's handy walls. It was nature not development that was in charge. His pencil and mixed media drawings, entitled Field Notes, reflect that, with images of the herons and of his own shadow looming over the ground as he photographs the site or bends down to pick up stones. Illustrative and narrative, they are far removed from grand minimalist sculpture. 'I find it eye-watering the resources that go into that kind of work, for the vision of a singular person. I often respond more strongly to the poetics of a scrappy piece of material. Or that an idea in an artist's book can be equally profound and grand and huge. The sense of mass and scale is only achieved by actually making it that mass,' he said, referring to Shift. 'So, I recognize that it does need to be this way, but it's the antithesis of how I would want to work.' Sullivan's work is moving on now; he teaches at Toronto's Ontario College of Art & Design University and works out of a weekend studio east of the city, near Tamworth, Ont., where he is cutting out the modernist middleman and erecting his own dry-stone wall. Meanwhile, the future of Shift remains foggy. Municipal preservation efforts in the early 2000s did lead to designating the field a protected cultural landscape but in 2010-12 the Art Gallery of Ontario abandoned discussions about acquiring Shift when it became clear there wouldn't be public access. Sullivan, who is cautious about revealing the field's exact location, thinks that if it were turned into a public park Serra's walls would soon be targeted with graffiti. Today Shift is famous yet hidden, safe in its state of neglect. Derek Sullivan: Field Notes continues at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ont., until June 29.
CBC
13-05-2025
- Business
- CBC
AI-grown lettuce could help ease the U.S. trade war pain
For the first time, a King City, Ont., greenhouse has harvested thousands of pounds of lettuce grown entirely by automation with AI monitoring temperature, light and humidity. The grower hopes the model can help Canada be less reliant on the American market.
