Bone cancer survivor to join SpaceX flight
Colorado’s four-game series against Vegas ends with thud in shutout defeat at Ball Arena
CA PEC A N AVER A L, FL A . » After beating bone cancer, Hayley Arceneaux figures rocketing into orbit on SpaceX’s first private flight should be a piece of cosmic cake.
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital announced Monday that the 29-yearold physician assistant — a former patient hired last spring — will launch later this year alongside a billionaire who’s using his purchased spaceflight as a charitable fundraiser.
Arceneaux will become the youngest American in space — beating NASA record-holder Sally Ride by over two years — when she blasts off this fall with entrepreneur Jared Isaacman and two yet-to-be-chosen contest winners.
She’ll also be the first to launch with a prosthesis. When she was 10, she had surgery at St. Jude to replace her knee and get a titanium rod in her left thigh bone. She still limps and suffers occasional leg pain, but has been cleared for flight by SpaceX. She’ll serve as the crew’s medical officer.
“My battle with cancer really prepared me for space travel,” Arceneaux said in an interview with The Associated Press. “It made me tough, and then also I think it really taught me to expect the unexpected and go along for the ride.”
She wants to show her young patients and other cancer survivors that “the sky is not even the limit anymore.”
“It’s going to mean so much to these kids to see a survivor in space,” she said.
Isaacman announced his space mission Feb. 1, pledging to raise $200 million for St. Jude, half of that his own contribution. As the flight’s self-appointed commander, he offered one of the four SpaceX Dragon capsule seats to St. Jude.
Without alerting the staff, St. Jude chose Arceneaux from among the “scores” of hospital and fundraising employees who had once been patients and could represent the next generation, said Rick Shadyac, president of St. Jude’s fundraising organization.
Arceneaux was at home in Memphis, Tenn., when she got the “out of the blue” call in January asking if she’d represent St. Jude in space.
Her immediate response: “Yes! Yes! Please!” But first she wanted to run it past her mother in St. Francisville, La. (Her father died of kidney cancer in 2018.) Next she reached out to her brother and sister-in-law, both of them aerospace engineers in Huntsville, Ala., who “reassured me how safe space travel is.”
A lifelong space fan who embraces adventure, Arceneaux insists those who know her won’t be surprised. She’s plunged on a bungee swing in New Zealand and ridden camels in Morocco.
Isaacman, who flies fighter jets for a hobby, considers her a perfect fit.
“It’s not all supposed to be about getting people excited to be astronauts someday, which is certainly cool,” Isaacman, 38, said last week.
He has two more crew members to select, and plans to reveal them in March.
One will be a sweepstakes winner; anyone donating to St. Jude this month is eligible. So far, more than $9 million has come in, according to Shadyac. The other seat will go to a business owner who uses Shift4Payments, Isaacman’s Allentown, Pa., credit card-processing company.
Liftoff is targeted around October at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, with the capsule orbiting Earth two to four days.
Vegas goalie Marc-Andre Fleury made a desperation two-pad stick save on Nazem Kadri late in the first period Monday at Ball Arena, preventing what looked like a sure Avalanche goal — the first of the game.
“They’re just fun,” Fleury said of the desperation save, “especially when you stop them.”
Fleury and the Golden Knights had much more fun than the Avs in the fourth consecutive meeting between the West Division heavyweights, winning 3-0 to salvage a split of the four-game “series.”
Three Vegas forwards had big games and goalie Fleury made several outstanding saves en route to his second shutout over the Avs since last week’s opener in Las Vegas. Alex Tuch had two goals, William Karlsson had two primary assists and Jonathan Marchessault scored the Knights’ third goal in a nineminute span of the second period which served as the key stretch of the game.
Colorado outshot Vegas 34-28, including 15-6 in the third period. But the Avs committed nine giveaways to the Knights’ three, and Vegas blocked 17 shots to Colorado’s 11.
“Fleury was good but that wasn’t our best effort,” Avs forward Matt Calvert said. “We got a lot of our chances in the third period when they were sitting back and defending a 3-0 lead. We can’t come out in a game like that against a top team in the league.
“For whatever reason it was we didn’t have our legs and weren’t putting in the work right off the bat. It costs us in the end.”
The Knights improved to a divisionleading 11-4-1. The Avs (9-5-1) are third behind St. Louis (10-7-2) with four games in hand over the Blues.
It was the Avs’ first home loss since opening night on Jan. 13 when they fell 4-1 to the St. Louis Blues. Colorado had won five straight home games, the lon
gest streak in the NHL, and it included Saturday’s 3-2 victory over Vegas in Lake Tahoe, which counted as an Avalanche home game.
Colorado entered Monday outscoring its opponents 23-6 during the home winning streak (20-4 at Ball Arena). The Avs, who also play the Minnesota Wild at Ball Arena for a makeup game Wednesday, fell to 6-2-1 in their last nine games overall.
“I give them credit. They came out and played hard. They challenged us on the defensive side of it,” Avs coach Jared Bednar said of the Knights. “I would guess that’s the most chances they’ve created against us in the four games that we’ve played. I did not love us defensively. I think they won the bulk of the battles which led to their chances. On the other side of it, we looked sluggish that we didn’t have our jump, our legs, and we lacked energy for the better part of the game.”
Avs star center Nathan MacKinnon, who was the player of the game in Saturday’s outdoor game, was relatively quiet in his 539th NHL game — all with the Avs — to surpass Paul Stastny for 10th-most games played in an Avalanche jersey.
Marchessault scored Vegas’ third goal at 11:06 of the second period. His wrist shot from between the circle beat goalie Philipp Grubauer to the stick side. Karlsson set the play up from the sideboards with a short headman pass — his second of the period.
Tuch broke through twice after neither team struck in the opening 20 minutes. Tuch’s first came on the power play at 2:53 into the middle frame. He accepted a short pass on the Avs’ blueline from Karlsson, split defenders Ryan Graves and Tyson Jost to the net, and beat Grubauer on the breakaway. Avs defenseman Conor Timmins was in the penalty box serving a tripping minor.
Tuch scored again at 6:14 to double Vegas’ lead. He took possession of the puck in the neutral zone and drove hard to the net from the left wing. Grubauer stopped his back-hand bid but the rebound caromed in off the skate of rookie Avs defenseman Bo Byram.
The Avs entered the game with an NHL-low goals-against average of 2.07. Vegas was second at 2.20 and Fleury on Monday helped prove how stingy the Knights can be.
footnotes. The Avalanche used the same lineup from Lake Tahoe, which was nearly at fullstrength. Defenseman Erik Johnson (upper-body) and backup goalie Pavel Francouz (lowerbody) remain out long-term with injuries. Also, it was announced Monday that depth defenseman Dennis Gilbert underwent surgery to repair a facial bone. Gilbert was injured in a fight with Vegas’ Keegan Kolesar last week in the second game of the “series.” … Referee Tom Chmielewski of Colorado Springs worked the game. He is the NHL’s only full-time ref from Colorado.
CORTINA D’AMPEZZO» If Mikaela Shiffrin were a baseball player, her numbers would make her a post-season MVP.
Every year.
The American skier won four medals in her four events at the recently concluded world championships and improved her career record at the next-biggest event in skiing after the Olympics to 11 medals in 13 races.
Her Olympic record? medals in five events.
That’s a combined 14 for 18 at major championships — worlds and Olympics.
To put those numbers in perspective, consider Lindsey Vonn’s career results at major championships. While the retired Vonn remains the most successful female skier in World Cup history with a record 82 victories (Shiffrin has 68 World Cup wins at age 25), her haul of 11 medals in 39 races already pales in comparison to Shiffrin.
So how does Shiffrin do it? Well, beyond her extraordinary skills and years and years of training, it’s all about her mental approach.
Shiffrin, you see, has had the same exact focus for medal races since her very first big event — the 2013 worlds in Schladming, Austria. Or, to be more precise, since halfway through the slalom at those worlds, when she won the world title at age 17.
Shiffrin recently thought back to that race, acknowledging that she was “freaking out” between runs.
After the first leg, Shiffrin sat third behind Scandinavian veterans Frida Hansdotter and Tanja Poutiainen, and had Maria Höfl-Riesch and Tina Maze — two of the greatest skiers of their generation — breathing down her neck in fourth and fifth position, respectively.
Shiffrin was listening to music on her headphones but having a tough time taming her nerves inside the hospitality area when U.S. teammate Steven Nyman walked in and asked her mom and coach, Eileen, what the problem was.
Three
“He said, ‘Alright, alright, alright. Tell her to take her headphones off, we have to have a discussion,’” Shiffrin said.
“And we did. And he said, ‘World championships there is one goal. You’re not trying to protect your lead in the overall title or the season titles or anything. You’re not protecting anything. You go for gold, that’s it. … You have everything to gain and nothing to lose. So go for it.’
“And I was like, ‘Huh. That’s really interesting. OK,’” Shiffrin added. “And it didn’t, like, take away my nerves of whether I could ski faster, make up the time difference, or all those different pieces. But it got me psyched up just to do my best.”
Nyman, a 39-year-old downhiller who has won three World Cup downhills but never a medal at a worlds or Olympics, recalled how he “found it kind of funny that she was so nervous even though she had already had so much success.”
“But that’s what makes her unique,” Nyman said via email. “(Marcel) Hirscher had the same attitude. He never felt like he was so good he could cruise.”
Hirscher, the recently retired Austrian who won a record eight straight overall World Cup titles, also once discussed how he consistently employed his go-for-broke strategy.
As Nyman suggested, Hirscher imagined that he was always being chased.
“If you’re standing in front of a big, big, huge wall, and you have no opportunity to climb up there, and then behind you, there are a hundred crazy dogs who want to eat you up, then you have to go for your life,” Hirscher said in 2013 when asked to explain his approach.
It’s the same attacking mentality that Shiffrin employed when she won gold in combined, silver in giant slalom and bronze in super-G and slalom over the last two weeks in Cortina.
The four medals matched the biggest haul ever by a woman at worlds, with Marielle Goitschel (in 1966), Rosi Mittermaeier (1976), Hanni Wenzel (1980) and Anja Pärson (2007) also having won four medals in a single edition.
Shiffrin’s achievement was all the more remarkable considering that she didn’t race for 10 months last year following the sudden death of her father, Jeff Shiffrin. Her comeback was then slowed by the coronavirus pandemic and a back injury.
Without much training, Shiffrin had raced only sparingly entering the worlds.
“She doesn’t have the dominance this year as years past so it had to be hard for her find that belief to win,” said Nyman, who has known Shiffrin since she was a child. “She is facing new mental arenas currently and it has been fun to watch her navigate them.”
Grammy-winning electronic music pioneers Daft Punk have announced that they are breaking up after 28 years.
The helmet-wearing French duo shared the news Monday in an 8-minute video called “Epilogue.” Kathryn Frazier, the band’s longtime publicist, confirmed the break up for The Associated Press.
Daft Punk, comprised of Thomas Bangalter and GuyManuel de Homem-Christo, have had major success over the years, winning six Grammy Awards and launching international hits with “One More Time,” “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” and “Get Lucky.”
Bangalter and de HomemChristo met at a Paris school in 1987. Prior to Daft Punk, they formed an indie rock band named Darling.
They officially formed Daft Punk in 1993, and the helmeted, mute and mysterious musicians released their debut album, “Homework,” in 1997. They first found success with the international hit “Da Funk,” which topped the Billboard dance charts and earned them their first Grammy nomination. A second No. 1 hit and Grammy nomination followed with “Around the World.”
Daft Punk spent time touring around the world and reached greater heights with their sophomore album, 2001’s “Discovery.” It included the infectious smash “One More Time” and “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger,” which Kanye West famously flipped into his own hit “Stronger,” released in 2007. It won West the best rap solo performance Grammy at the 2008 show, where West and Daft
Punk performed together onstage.
A year later, a live version of “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” won Daft Punk the best dance recording Grammy — their first win — and their
“Alive 2007” album picked up best electronic/dance album.
But it was the 2014 Grammys where Daft Punk really took the spotlight, winning album of the year for “Random Access Memories” and making history as the first electronic act to win the highest honor at the Grammys. The duo won four awards that night, including record of the year for their bombshell hit “Get Lucky,” featuring Pharrell Williams and Nile Rodgers.
“Random Access Memories” was regarded as a genre-bending album highlighted by its mix of live instrumentation, disco sounds, funk, rock, R&B and more. Rolling Stone ranked it No. 295 on their list of the “500 Greatest Albums of All Time” last year.