Swedish Slash Attack Deveaux Leaves Investigation Behind

Andre Deveaux was banned for a year, but further investigation into his vicious attack on Swede Per Helmersson has been dropped now the Canadian has gone home

Ice hockey has a reputation for violence that has been immortalized in movies, celebrated in Youtube clips and has left many of us wondering why all those people who like to bet on sports in Sweden or Canada or any other participating countries find it so riveting to do so on sites like ComeOn! Sportsbook. It’s not. The sport is a mixture of blur and impact, of invisible swishing puck and player-on-player collisions, and frankly I find it somewhat baffling that anyone would enjoy watching this confusions of skates and sticks, let alone bet on it.

Swedes Drop Investigation

• Slash attack player returns to Canada
• Deveaux won’t be back to Sweden
• One year ban stands, but is it enough?

My own distaste with the sport probably stems from a youth that involved very traumatic experiences with both hockey and ice. I only ever played the former once, when very young, in a misconceived boys-vs-girls match at school, it still gives me nightmares and I maintain the damage done to certain extremely precious and important parts of my anatomy that day by a psychotic female six year old wielding a stick are the reason that my wife and I don’t have children all these years later.

The relationship I have with ice is equally traumatic, albeit it for slightly different reasons. Aged around fourteen the school in London I was attending took us chaps (all boys school) ice skating in Richmond, which seemed to us a lovely idea. Unfortunately my own experience that day was to scar me for life, not physically but psychologically, and leave me with an extreme mistrust of any quantity of ice larger than three cubes in my gin and tonic.

Ice, Ice, Baby

Take 30 fourteen year olds to a public ice rink and the chaos that ensues is predictable. Some can skate, some can’t, and the rest are somewhere between the two causing as much trouble as they can get away with without attracting the attention of attending teachers. On the day we went a group of French kids were also present, and some of us amused ourselves by skating up to French girls, saying the only words in French we knew and might be applicable, and then skating off perhaps gambling news of our bravery would do our school kudos good.

Personally I had no inclination to slam into the side boards next to a French girl, mutter “I love you” in badly accented French and then attempt to skate off without going arse-over-tit, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t paying close attention to those amongst my peers that felt it good fun. My skating ability was such that so long as I kept moving I was alright, it was just stopping and starting I had issue with so I circulated the rink happily whilst friends made tits of themselves over the ladies.

Unfortunately for me a girl with a very nice smile caught and held my attention, skating around on the ice at a pace similar to mine, and in attempts to keep both eyes on her, I forgot about needing to concentrate on staking and without warning I lost all balance, scythed sideways and felt my head bounce heavily off the ice, then, in an amusing metaphor for my love-life ahead, the pretty girl’s ice skate hammered into my recumbent bonce and in great pain I lost consciousness.

Deveaux Decamps

Thus it is I find myself somewhat bias against ice hockey, but ice hockey does itself no favors with violence tolerated if not positively encouraged, which makes the entire sport questionable at best, the rules apparently somewhat optional. Worse still if you were Swedish gambling laws of the game would be actually upheld after a player was savagely attacked even before the match in which they were to play has even started you were sadly mistaken, as the instance with Andre Deveaux proves.

Andre Deveaux made headlines for his ridiculously uncalled for attack on Per Helmersson, captain of Vasteras, before his team Rogle even took to the ice, scything the player down with his stick in what many saw as revenge for a dubious impact from Helmersson on Deveaux earlier in the series. Perhaps in an attempt to demonstrate they have limits, the Swedes banished him from the sport for a year, with the press savaging him for his violence bringing the game into disrepute (which is like bemoaning a driver speeding at the Indy 500).

Deveaux claims he was “protecting” himself when “no one else would” which rings a tad hollow, but despite that the Swedish hockey authorities have decided to drop their case after Deveaux left the country with no inclination to ever return. Sweden won’t miss him, but ice hockey might just want to look into life-time international bans from the sport for people who so flagrantly turn a game, or even pre-game, into a violent personal grudge match if they want to be taken more seriously and get better results than an unbalanced fourteen year old’s attempts at romance.