Your midday sports snack.

Toast points

• The Argonauts had an additional passenger on their flight home from Ottawa this morning. Quarterback Ricky Ray carried the Grey Cup onto the tarmac at Toronto’s Pearson Airport hours after his team ripped the trophy from the waiting hands of the heavily favoured Stampeders. “The guys are pretty tired — not very much sleep last night,” Ray told reporters at the airport. Rested or not, the Argos will celebrate their franchise’s 17th championship tomorrow at a 12:30 p.m. rally at City Hall.

• The grimmest losing streak in Canadian hockey finally came to an end this weekend. The Junior B Surrey Knights, losers of 88 straight games in British Columbia’s Pacific Junior Hockey League, upset the Abbotsford Pilots 2-0 on Friday night for their first win since Nov. 19, 2015. Knights goalie Zakary Babin posted a 49-save shutout and his teammates scored twice on the power play, despite generating only 12 shots all game.

Nick Faris wrote about the Knights’ joyless skid at the end of last season, chronicling the suspensions, dismissals, injuries and trades that sent the franchise into disarray — and the hint of optimism that somehow persisted.

• The Pyeongchang Organizing Committee released a ticket-sales update over the weekend saying that 52 per cent of tickets available for the 2018 Olympics have now been sold. Tickets for snow and ice sports have been sold at a 54 per cent rate, and the Opening Ceremony is 52 per cent sold. Tickets for sliding sports are lagging at 37 per cent.

• Canada officially has four entries in the Grand Prix final figure skating event in Nagoya, Japan, starting Dec. 6. Meagan Duhamel and Eric Radford’s third-place finish at Skate America over the weekend was more than enough to qualify them in the top six on the Grand Prix circuit. Kaetlyn Osmond in women’s and Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir in ice dance had previously qualified. Ice dancers Marjorie Lajoie and Zachary Lagha also qualified in the junior division.

• Canadian IOC member Richard Pound told a conference in the Netherlands on Sunday that Olympic decision-makers won’t be prompted to act on real anti-doping measures unless they feel some pain in “their wallets.” Inside The Games reported that Pound also suggested to the Play The Game conference in Eindhoven that the key to holding organizing bodies accountable is for athletes to speak up.

“Nothing scares these old folks as much as athletes getting organized — so don’t stop doing that,” said Pound, who was the World Anti-Doping Agency’s first president from 1999-2007. He believes the IOC and the international sports federations were wrong not to take a hard line against Russia for the 2016 Olympics: “It would have been a major lesson and a major deterrent for all other countries that might be saying: ‘Oh, they’re willing to do this to Russia — maybe I better be getting my act cleaned up.’”

The IOC is scheduled to make a decision on Russia’s participation in the 2018 Olympics on Dec. 5.

Nutritional information

The weather was a big part of the story of Grey Cup 105. Based on weather observations contained in the CFL Record and Guide Book, it was the 14th time it has ever snowed during the game, but only the third time in the last 34 years (1984 and 1996 were the others). Of the 14 references to snow, seven are simply to flurries.

Below is a pie chart of the various weather conditions recorded by the CFL. Four years did not have an overall weather condition report, so we looked at Environment Canada data for those days to fill in the blanks.

Commissioner Randy Ambrosie said on Thursday that he might like to see the Grey Cup moved forward into October to take advantage of the better weather.

The CFL also had temperature recordings in its weather observations. Below is a boxplot showing the range of temperatures for the outdoor games. There have been 15 indoor games at BC Place, Olympic Stadium and SkyDome/Rogers Centre.

Half of the 106 weather observations contained within the boxplot fell between a temperature of -2.5 C and 7 C with a median temperature of 2.5 C. (There were two seasons that had two Grey Cup days: 1940 was a two-game home-and-home series between Ottawa and Toronto’s Balmy Beach club; the 1962 game in Toronto, the Fog Bowl, had to be played over two days.) The 1940 game played in Toronto is the only recorded reference to a blizzard in the CFL data.

The temperature outlier in the 105th season was the 1991 game in Winnipeg, with a recorded temperature of -17 C.

Photos of the day

In case you were wondering, Shania Twain’s dramatic ride onto the field in Ottawa last night wasn’t a late addition to the halftime program. The dog sled that ferried Twain to the stage was reportedly equipped with wheels, meaning it could have been used no matter the weather. Still, the snow that started to fall shortly before kickoff was a nice touch.

At nationalpost.com

• The Argonauts will tell you that their Grey Cup victory was rooted in faith, that they managed to pull ahead in the dying minutes on Sunday because they loved and believed in each other. It’s a load of hooey, writes Scott Stinson, given that the championship would have been Calgary’s if Kamar Jorden was quicker to fall to his knees. But after such a preposterous finish, is fate really that silly an explanation?

• When Alex Ovechkin pledged his public support for Vladimir Putin earlier this month, the Capitals captain insisted it had nothing to do with politics. “I don’t want to fight between two countries,” he recently told the Washington Post, “because it’s going to be a mess.” Here, the Post goes deep on Ovechkin’s complex history with the Russian president — and its implications for a star athlete caught between Moscow and D.C.

TV tonight

All times Eastern

7 p.m. NHL: Philadelphia at Pittsburgh Sportsnet, TVAS
7 p.m. NBA: Cleveland at Philadelphia SN One
7:30 p.m. NHL: Columbus at Montreal TSN2, RDS
8 p.m. NHL: Minnesota at Winnipeg TSN3
8:15 p.m. NFL: Houston at Baltimore TSN1,4,5, RDS2
10:30 p.m. NBA: Lakers at Clippers SN One

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