Dynamic duo share Canada's best athlete award

For the first time in 37 years, the Lou Marsh Trophy, presented to Canada's best athlete, ended up in a tie. Football's doctor, Laurent Duvernay-tardif of Mont-joli, Que., and young soccer player Alphonso Davies of Edmonton, tied in the voting for the prestigious award.

The final vote from a media panel across Canada, ended in an 18-18-1 draw, with the other vote believed to have gone to Kitchener NBA star Jamal Murray. It was a good tie, if there can be such a thing, for the 82-year-old award.

Both of them deserving, though. Both of them, in life and in their own pursuits, rather remarkable people and performers.

“I am truly honoured and humbled to have been selected as the co-winner for the 2020 Lou Marsh Trophy,” Davies, who was born in a refugee camp in Ghana and moved to Canada at age five, said in a Canada Soccer news release. “Canada welcomed me and my family and I am grateful for the opportunity to realize my dream of being a professional football player and representing Canada on the world stage.”

Duvernay-tardif started and won the Super Bowl playing offensive guard for the Kansas City Chiefs, but it was his actions after winning the title that garnered him so much attention. The player known as LDT opted out of playing for the Chiefs this NFL season to concern himself with battling COVID-19. Duvernay-tardif returned home following the Super Bowl to work, not as a doctor, but as a nurse in a long-term housing facility.

It was that attitude that prompted Sports Illustrated to honour him as one of their five Sportsmen of the Year.

“Humbled to win the Lou Marsh Award with @Alphonsodavies one of the greatest athletes Canada has ever produced,” Duvernay-tardif wrote on Twitter.

Davies is a star with Bayern Munich of Germany's Bundesliga. The 20-year-old became the first Canadian to win a Champions League men's title earlier this year, was named the Bundesliga rookie of the year, and was named the No. 1 Canadian male soccer player for 2020 last week.

The last time there was a tie in Lou Marsh voting? Rick Hansen tied Wayne Gretzky in 1983, and in 1978, swimmer Graham Smith tied with skier Ken Read.

The other finalists for the award: Murray of the Denver Nuggets and soccer players Christine Sinclair and Kadeisha Buchanan.