(Country 93.3 and Rock 97.9’s Tyler King is on location with the Fort McMurray Oil Barons in Russia for the first-ever World Junior Club Cup – he’ll be providing regular updates on the team’s historic trek. Follow him at http://www.twitter.com/tyler_king for the most immediate info and pictures!)
The Fort McMurray Oil Barons have arrived.
The journey was long, the hiccups were occasional, but the whole organization has finally settled in, it seems.
It all began with Tuesday morning’s pep rally at the Casman Centre, which went off about as well as anyone could’ve hoped. There’s no question that it looked like a tough sell – would McMurryites come out at 9:30 on a weekday morning just to send off the local hockey team? The pictures sure prove that they would.
From Fort McMurray, the flight to Toronto was uneventful, but also a good piece of preparation for the long haul to Frankfurt.
Pearson International also allowed the team to meet up with new goaltender Brody Hoffman, whose saga to become eligible for the tournament took a few more last-minute twists. Having only been acquired a week before the tournament, the paperwork to get him a Russian visa was rushed as much as possible; however, it only resulted in a visa that allowed him in after the start of the tournament exhibition games.
Hoffman flew to Ottawa to fix the issue, but then had his flight to Toronto cancelled because of mechanical issues. A stroke of good luck on a standby flight got him to Pearson just in time to meet with the rest of the team and move on to Frankfurt and then Moscow – we arrived at about 6:45 PM local time, after almost twenty hours of travel.
The flights themselves, while long, went off without much of a hitch — it was upon arrival in Moscow that the culture shock may have finally begun.
What was advertised to the team as a fifteen-minute bus ride to the hotel in Moscow became a nearly two-hour journey of what felt like near-death experiences. I tell all those who complain about Highway 63 traffic – you have not seem jams, you have not seen driver insanity, until you have seen downtown Moscow. The shoulder of the highway is, in effect, a passing lane. A scooter bike lay torn up on the side of the road after a collision with a bus, as an ambulance’s siren failed entirely to cause any movement of the stop-and-go traffic ahead.
Perhaps all of that made the eventual arrival at the hotel in Moscow all the more sweet.
The accommodation the team is getting is fantastic. The first night’s dinner, while eaten with a general feeling of fatigue amongst the group, gave a glimpse into the variety and enormity of the local cuisine – not to mention rekindling my love affair with Chicken Kiev.
The night ended with instructions from Assistant Coach Tom Keca – the team’s first practice was to be at 11am the next morning (and it was already 11pm local time by the time dinner wrapped up).
Keca himself played several years in the former Yugoslavia and knew about the challenges this kind of travel can present. In a brief after-dinner interview he mentioned that he could tell some of the players would be wide awake all night, while some wouldn’t have much of a problem hitting the hay – all dependent on which ones were able to catch some shut-eye on the trip over.
The week in Moscow is a busy one. After their first practice, the team takes a tour of Moscow in the afternoon to soak in the world-class historic city, then it’s back to hockey. Exhibition game 1 goes against the Blue Cadets team, and game 2 will feature the Russian Red Army team – the same squad that will be representing Russia at the tournament in Omsk (and won last year’s Kharlamov Cup as the best junior team in the region). That’s also the team that the Barons could be facing in the final.
From here, the Barons fly to Omsk on Sunday – and then the real fun begins.
Stay tuned! And don’t forget to listen to the news on Country 93.3 and Rock 97.9 at 8:30am, Noon, 3pm, and 6pm to hear our Oil Barons Russia Report!
Tyler King
Moscow, Russian Federation
7:51 AM Moscow Summer Time (Aug 25) / 9:51 PM Mountain Daylight Time (Aug 24)
