The article says playing and watching (not justs playing).

So here is the deal. South Asians are the largest minority in Canada comprising 5.6%. Also in South Asia Cricket is the most important thing around minus wars between neighbouring countries and associated politics. The market cap of the Indian Premier League (currenly playing its finals in front of no fans in Dubai) is $6.5Billion USD. Incidentlally Covid19 cases have come down in India as soon as the IPL launched its season behind closed doors in Dubai (so everyone is staying home and watching cricket)

Coming back to Canada, I THINK this article is talking team sports so if you take 5.6% of Canadians of South Asian origin, most of whom have never skated, don't care about hockey or baseball or basketbally you can quickly see how quickly cricket gets to number 5.

As for cricket vs triathlon there is literally me and no one else from my ethnic group in Canada that does triathlon....so if all my ethnic group are either watching cricket or doing it, pretty quickly it surpasses me and all the white and random asian and black people doing triathlon in this country.

There is probably no single ethnic group in Canada that actually cares about any sport (2nd place ethnic group by population are Chinese Canadians and I don't think they are tied to any single sport).

So those for you my friend is some of the math behind it.

Yup, aside from a few people on ST, no on in this country cares about triathlon. They certainly don't know that challenge Daytona is on deck and that Kona was cancelled.

Whaaaaaaaaat ?
Don't they all know about Lionel?
😱


(message sent from England... ODI World champions 😎)

Cricket creeping onto this list is due to the immigration flood with 300,000+ new Canadian's every year. In my town all of the baseball/football fields are taken over every weekend with guys playing cricket. Something I never saw just 10 years ago.

Thanks Dev - an eye opener for sure.

But baseball, the small ball and overhand stuff, who plays that?

Slowpitch, ok. Softball, maybe. Fastball, well.

And not having curling on this list was just mean.

The Brits thought Clapton was God.

WE know it was Eugene Hritzuk

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http://www.fitspeek.com the Fraser Valley's fitness, wellness, and endurance sports podcast

Appreciating cricket is a sign of civilisation. Canada is obviously maturing as a nation ;-)
I can see several junior games happening on the park next to my house this morning.

There are 1500 curling clubs across Canada, so apart from the large south Asian populations around Toronto and Vancouver, I would have to question that cricket is #5. None of the transplanted English that I know have ever picked up a cricket bat in Canada and I played football (proper name) with a few teams, although I'm sure some would if cricket was played in the street as it was in England when I was a kid (And dinosaurs roamed the Earth).

As for Triathlon, while there is virtually no spectator interest, I think a statistician could have a lot of fun playing with participant numbers. There are two series in southern Ontario and on average those series would have had 8 races each with at least two events (sprint Olympic) plus other stand alone and smaller series, who in a normal year would have perhaps another 40 events scattered throughout the province. along with a bunch of half and full distance events. Assuming (lots of that) that a third to half of each race was newbies that would be several thousand new Triathletes each season. Put those numbers together and they would rival adult participation in almost any sport. including hockey.....(sacrilege)

Finally Canada is civilised enough to join its cricket loving Commonwealth brothers and sisters.

Haha....we need to get all those brown guys intro triathlon LOL to get our sport on the list :-). On a plus note my parents know more about when the Hawaii Ironman is on over the Indian Premier League. So that's two extra sets of eyeballs, but in 55 years of living in Canada, the only time they cared about hockey was when the Montreal Canadiens were winning 6 times in the 70's, 1986, and 1993.

I was wondering why Cricket beat curling (or even triathlon), but the article is "play or watch" (not just play). So this explains it when you have that many South Asian origin Canadians. Most South Asian origin Canadians don''t PLAY anything (at least the ones I have interacted with in my community which is not a very comprehesive set). We just study, try to climb corporate ladders, try to brag about our kids getting into med school or them climbing corporate ladders, complain about politicians in India, analyse why India and Pakistan are about to go into ANOTHER WAR, some random ones watch Bollywood and some random ones if they watch any sport it is cricket....but now there is Hockey Nite In Canada in Punjabi.

But, I'll take a solid cricket match over a triathlon for watching...a triathlon over cricket for "doing" (but I was a pretty decent wicket keeper and opening batsman with cat like agility at one time). Being a wicket keeper and opening batsman is being a complete sucker or punishment so triathlon kind of makes good sense and fits with that psychology.

You have to love any sport that has a position called "Silly Mid On"



As an addendum, me and my kids have won every egg catch competition at any resort, because I taught them how to catch "cricket style".
No wimpy ass'd catching gloves in cricket.

Great point.
With Australia being the exception to that statement that proves the rule, obvs.😁

Cricket in Australia was and is a matter of practicality:
No trees means no drop bears
wide open space means you can see the snakes coming
No water involved - no Crocs or Bull sharks
long sleeves and pants to protect limbs from stinging and biting things
Bats to defend against any of the above and all the other critters
Also they have a lot of space (and not much rain in Queensland and above), which is ideal for cricket.

As the cities have grown larger and pushed their fauna further away Australians have been able to develop Aussie Rules as a sport that suits their culture - prancing around in tight clothes punting a ball.

A few years ago I was in Oman in holiday - definitely not a cricket, or indeed sport, nation.

I pulled back the curtains on the Friday morning to see what all the noise was about - a full scale cricket match on the waste ground opposite. Two teams of Indians / Bangladeshi playing cricket.

Presumably they were from the building sites enjoying their day off.

The only live sport I've followed since Covid were the Test matches between England and West Indies - which were really good.

While Toronto/Brampton and Vancouver/Lower mainland have really large south asian populations, there are plenty of other places. Where I work in the Ottawa suburbs there is a massive population of Indian/Pakistani/Bangladeshi that are typically nuts about cricket. There is even a small, but so far unsuccessful, movement to get cricket as an official high school sport. Interestingly enough at one point the high school where I work actually did have a triathlon team.

Haha....we just need to get more of those South Asians into triathlons in Canada. Since 1985, if asked by someone how they can find me a triathlon, a swim meet, an XC ski race in Canada, how to find me, my answer has been and continues to be, "Look for the one brown guy...even if there are 2-3 we can probably point you to the other guys".

On a plus note, if South Asians actually do sport (like Cricket) that is great. When I grew up, in Canada, forget about triathlon, no South Asian adults did any sport....kids might play on school teams back then if we made the cut (kind of hard to do when your parents put you in zero sports, but sports like soccer, or track you could just go out and do ad magically make school teams if you tried), but parents would dissuade us from doing sport and just brow beat kids to study more LOL!

IPL is playing its final two championship games of their season based out of Dubai on Sunday and Tuesday...I am sure many Canadian ex. South Asian eyeballs will be glued to that (I did not get a subscription since I am watching the Vuelta). The T20 world cup which was supposed to be in Australia now won't happen (like the Tour Down Under won't happen). Its going to be in Nov 2021 (in India), so I will definitely get a subscription to that after Kona 2021 is over.

That list that I posted has proven quite rich for discussion. We could probably do the topic a better service by having 2 top five lists (maybe 10 lists??).

• Top 5 Canadian sports that people actually participate in.
• Top 5 Canadian sports that people watch (be that on a screen, or in a public venue, such as the Regina Agridome).

NOT including Olympic years. As that tends to skew things... I would say a lot. Not a lot of coverage of SKELETON except from those things that happen every four years in places with snow and money.

Maybe figure skating is the biggie!

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http://www.fitspeek.com the Fraser Valley's fitness, wellness, and endurance sports podcast

I would guess that top sport that people in Canada do by numbers will actually be running. Watching is still going to be hockey. In any case, if I could get my ethnic group off their collective asses and actually do sport, that would be a start. Canada has much to offer beyond academics and corporate ladder climbing and sitting around and talking about politics back in South Asia and tuning in for the odd Bollywood event of Cricket match. Heck my parents in the 70s did not know how to swim, but they enrolled in swim lessons because they wanted their kids to learn and they themselves had the opportunity in Canada. If I got to a masters swim event today in 2020, there is all white guys, a few random Chinese and Japanese Canadians and pretty well zero South Asian Canadians doing this stuff.

Thus you get your Cricket 1, Triathlon zero stat (sadly). The entire thing hits a raw nerve with me, as I have tried to get my ethnic group to actually do some of this stuff, but largely other than a few random people who go against their community and "squander their time on sport", its a useless battle. We would rather sit around and exchange the business cards or business cards of our kids with fancy corporate titles or lots of alphabet soup degrees beside names LOL.

Pretty sure the top sport is soccer by registration, and running or swiming by participation. Bear in mind that includes people answering running who warm up on the treadmill in the gym, and swimming probably includes lazy rivers at the waterpark.

Swimming registrations are way down because of Covid, unfortunately. We need a good Olympics showing in 2021 to get those numbers back up.

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If you add up all the people registered in a normal year in running races, I would have thought it would exceed soccer. Then again those may not be "unique individuals". In any case, the most important thing is that hockey eventually gets surpassed in participation and viewing. Then we can join the rest of the world doing sports that the rest of the world cares about. Hockey, its basically around 5 countries who care (well, that's kind of like cricket too....if you want to be viewed as a proper sporting nation, you gotta kick ass at soccer and track, the sports accessible to all of the poorest kids on earth)