Nothing will dissuade Ford from continuing sports lockdown

TORONTO — Prepare yourself, Ontario, for two more weeks of no-sports misery.

Although sports organizers — on behalf of millions of frustrated, idled, even depressed young athletes across the province — are valiantly fighting back against the Ontario government’s current ban, it’s all for naught, apparently.

Postmedia has learned Premier Doug Ford’s office told tennis leaders this week it has no plans to budge from its decision early last month to prevent hundreds of thousands of Ontarians from playing their sport of choice before May 20, when province-wide emergency lockdown measures are scheduled to expire.

So you may play golf, tennis, soccer, baseball or run track almost anywhere else in North America. But not in Canada’s most populous province.

Sports-wise, Ontario remains yours not to discover.

The current province-wide stay-at-home order went into effect April 7, which shut down sports from Windsor, to Cornwall, to Moosonee to Kenora.

Ontario Soccer’s leaders on

Wednesday sent a letter to Ford urging him to rescind the all-sports ban, because the “social and physical neglect of our children and youth must stop.”

In interviews since Postmedia revealed contents of that letter on Wednesday, leaders of four other prominent outdoor sports in Ontario — tennis, football, baseball and track and field — shared with Postmedia what they’re doing so far in vain to convince advisers to Ford that sports, in fact, when organized, can be conducted safely even during a pandemic, as almost everywhere else in Canada and the U.S.