Johnny Gaudreau, Ghost Bikes, and what we want life to be like
We are all so tired of drunk drivers, and of cyclists getting struck and killed. The obvious grim connections in the road deaths of the NHL star and his brother Matthew Gaudreau are obvious.
The apothegm ‘first we mourn, then we work for change’ loops over and over after the deaths of NHL forward Johnny Gaudreau, 31, and his fellow hockey-pro brother Matthew, 29.
The morning after was not for soap-boxing. Sure, the dots — suspected drunk driver at the start of a long weekend; bicyclists on a rural road — connected so easily. People need space when active athletes die unexpectedly. We pour our hearts out for who was taken away and take in how that loss ripples through endless lives: Meredith Gaudreau and Madeline Gaudreau, both widowed; Katie Gaudreau, who was set to get married with her brothers as groomsmen; two tiny humans who will grow up without a dad and uncle they wou;d have wanted to get to know, as well as a potential third, since Madeline is pregnant. It is almost Shakespearean.
And so on through families, teammates, friends, and the parasocial fan-player bond, eh? People leave memorabilia outside the arena. Touching tributes, heartfelt, and totally sincere.
All of that, though, may not touch on the Why It Happened of it all. Why. One purgable phrase, pardon that this will come off preachily, is ‘I can’t believe this is happening.’ Where? Have? You? Been? It is easily believable after taking time to let it marinate, how in 2024 you can still get behind the wheel of a 6,000-pound vehicle after multiple wobbly pops, and how casual bias against cycling is baked into infrastructure in North America. For a visual, think of a Ghost Bike, the memorial put in place when a cyclist is struck and killed.
Now think of society as the hockey dressing room. Everyone in the eyeline of everyone else, expected to be accountable.
We choose how much rope or social licence to give to teammates with toxic traits. In this case, it’s the arbitrary line between drink-driving and alcohol-associated health outcomes. That touches a third rail: Profits for alcohol makers and the hospitality industry. It is a compromise we need for employment reasons. Then some people stray into becoming toxic teammates by driving after consuming multiple alcoholic beverages. Then throw in force multipliers that personal cars keep getting larger, and heavier, and more lethal but the roads do not get bigger or more accommodating to cyclists and pedestrians. And there is no check on drivers who have aggression toward cyclists.
Alcohol slows reflexes and escalates impulsivity. It was textbook how this happened. The Gaudreau deaths look exactly like social murder … the unnatural death that occurs due to social, political, or economic oppression.
Oppression may not apply in one strict sense. Yet North American cities and communities have made getting around All About The Car. The legal limit for blood-alcohol content creates a temptation to treat the law only as a suggestion. Thirdly, cyclists are still seen as interlopers, although they account for fewer than 5 percent of the trips on a city’s roadways. And one cannot help but draw a line from this outcome to the all-too-common pushback in North America against cycling infrastructure. Why is that?
If a coach in our dressing room was putting it on the whiteboard, the case for cycling safety would look like this.
Good bike infrastructure = more people cycling = less people driving = less traffic congestion for cars and cyclists = Everyone Wins.
We wanna win. So why do backs get up politically when a city wants to encourage cycling?
Those strands wind around and around, like the multi-coloured Pride tape Gaudreau put on his hockey stick for allyship. An eternal butt end can come for anyone, and one knows not when. It does not care how many millions of dollars Gaudreau earned to play hockey for the Columbus Blue Jackets and Calgary Flames.
How do the hockey community and hockey media even address that reality that affects all of us? Will it even want to?
Speaking up for cyclist safety, denouncing drink-driving beyond that Enjoy Responsibly boilerplate coda … that touches third rails with the NHL’s sponsors: automakers, alcoholic beverage companies, and tire manufacturers! Quite understandably, some fans are wired to that thinking, since the first point of reference with any hockey player now is his Average Annual Value against the salary cap.
A gutting part of the loss of Johnny Gaudreau is that it was not all about the money when he chose Columbus over Calgary in 2022. It was about family, his own and the one he and Meredith Gaudreau were going to have with their tiny humans Noa and Johnny.
“My family’s from New Jersey, and my wife’s family’s in Pennsylvania,” Gaudreau recently told me in Columbus. “We both grew up with big families, and that was an important part of our lives. After playing so far away from home for so long, Columbus was a perfect option for us. It’s close enough to home but far enough that we can have our own space to start our own family. That was the reason.”
— Rachel Milanta, Aug. 18, 20231
And now? Not.
There is another sad irony. The circle that the Gaudreaus built and earned in hockey was blindsided by the other crisis with drugs that are not advertised in NHL arenas and telecasts. Johnny Gaudreau was majorly supportive of his former Boston College Eagles teammate, Pittsburgh Penguins centre Kevin Hayes, after the shock death of the latter’s brother Jimmy Hayes three years ago. “Fentanyl and cocaine use contributed” to Jimmy Hayes’ death at 31.2
Now Johnny Hockey is gone at the same age… after someone had too much of a legal drug promoted by Gaudreau’s employer and then drove his car. Good one, Universe.
Some sad irony even emanates from the accused. One of New York City’s scandal sheets screamed the headline that the accused worked in a rehab centre. Aggregators jumped on it. He was a financial officer , which changes the shading. He was also a United States military veteran of the Kosovo campaign back in the ’90s. Nothing excuses losing track of how much tippling you did before operating a car, but one can only presume there were experiences he drank to blot out.
I wonder how many people who shared sympathetic posts ever complained about cyclists ‘taking up too much road,’ or leaned on their horn when one did not move aside. Or nodded and snickered in 2010 when Don Cherry riffed about “pinkos who ride bicycles,” and some media churned and spit it out in headlines instead of saying, this is fucked. We’re just amplifying politicizing bicycling now?3
Of course, the difference in public spending between ‘carfrastructure’ and cycling infrastructure is political. Drivers and cyclists are pitted, even when there is Just One Taxpayer, who might both drive and bicycle.
Ghost Bikes are the best reminder of what car culture makes and takes.
Those are makeshift memorials, a bike painted wholly white, raised when a cyclist is killed in a traffic collision. Advocacy groups place them to point out we need to stop making everything car-only and in the service of buying and selling. One day someone was using a relatively affordable, respectful to Mother Earth form of transportation to go about their daily errands.
And now, not.
I, for one, would love it if the Columbus Blue Jackets adopted this crude prototype as their shoulder patch for this season. Two bicycles, for Johnny and Matthew, instead of the Civil War cannon. Slag it as performative, but if it lights the spark for public policy wins, who cares!
I know some people did the ‘hug your kids a little tighter’ routine on Friday. As well they should.
My mind went to cycling safety and social licensing to drink-drive. People might say, ‘Now is not the time for that.’ So you encourage people to remember life is fragile, but let’s not lift a finger to reduce danger, or avenues for people to act shittily?
Bigger picture… these deaths are results of the social licence given to people who do shyte behaviours when they think they can get away with it.
The other side of the token is the judgment and ridicule of cyclists who choose to respect clean air and shared space. Like, here in Hamilton, Ont., there is a potential case of a man who harassed and stalked cyclists at “a popular training spot … frequently used for its challenging terrain and scenic views.”4
There is not a strong enough social sanction toward driving after drinking. And here one’s tangent wonders where the duly elected leaders have gone. A Canadian of my vintage wonders about the push to sell alcohol everywhere in Ontario, while the profits leave the public exchequer.
Once upon a time, when governments feigned caring about people’s health outcomes in the long run, they led in making tobacco smoking uncool and inconvenient. Commercial advertising was banned. Warning labels were mandated. It worked! In Canada 30 years ago, about 35 percent of the adult population used to smoke lung darts. Smoking rates are now down to 11 percent.
With impaired driving, there is messaging, but it’s undercooked. Please enjoy responsibly; whatever you say, Ms. Commercial Voiceover!
Ackshoully, another analogy is the airline industry in North America. Everyone groans when a mechanical issue delays their flight. The generally accepted principle, though, all doubt must be removed before a plane pushes back on the tarmac. There is no acceptable loss, or rounding errors when people have trusted their lives to a transportation system.
That gets fudged for vulnerable road users, which the Gaudreaus were on Aug. 29, 2024.
The legal system has a separate suite of penalties and punishments for motorists who are responsible for people’s deaths, even when their weapon weighs over 6,000 pounds. And, of course, we must be mindful that here is an area where restorative justice should have a bigger role than the prison-industrial complex.5
The criminal responsibility pie with the Gaudreaus’ death will be baked in court. Those will include how much alcohol the accused drank, his blood-alcohol level, and his prior driving record.
(The accused) failed a sobriety test at the scene and that he later admitted to consuming five to six beers before the accident, saying the alcohol “contributed to his impatience and reckless driving.”6
The court would likely also include what protective measures the victims took. Or did not take. Did they have bright reflective clothing? Were they wearing helmets? Were Johnny and Matthew riding single file or two abreast? Macabre, I know; but that is the legal system.
A wrongful death lawsuit is probably in play. Again, leave that to journalists versed in covering both courts and sports.
Here and now, it comes back to examining the casual bias, and their butt ends.
A further local example from my home city, where one dude is getting off — allegedly — by trying to injure cyclists. The public spending on better cycling infrastructure takes up about 2 percent of the roads budget, within the City of Hamilton’s capital budget. One Redditor figured out it costs about $6 a year for each ratepayer to chip in to get more and better bike lanes. Is that the one less trip to the fancy coffee place I have heard so much about in the generational divides?
Those cycling investments always get covered in the media. How the people’s money is being spent should be rigorously examined! It gets play since there is still a construct: roadways are only for cars, and everyone else got beaten with the social Darwinism ugly stick.
Echoes a Canadian injustice
Figuratively, that is the hole you can drive an SUV through.
And if this is hitting hard in Canada, my mind goes not to the fact Gaudreau starred with the Calgary Flames. It is the reality that the methodology that ended their lives echoes the injustice of the Neville-Lake family drunk driver killings in 2015.
The accused in the Gaudreau killings is a 43-year-old man. The criminal count that he is facing includes “death by auto,” which findlaw.com says carries a maximum 10-year prison sentence and US$200,000 fine in New Jersey.
Whelp then. If convicted, he will spend more in prison than Marco Muzzo. So there is that.
In 2015, Muzzo killed 9-year-old Daniel Neville-Lake, 5-year-old Harrison Neville-Lake, 2-year-old Milly Neville-Lake, and their 65-year-old maternal grandfather Gary Neville in a crash he caused. Muzzo drove drunk from Pearson Airport after flying home from his bachelor party in Miami. He was so intoxicated that his blood-alcohol content was thrice the legal limit, and he had pissed in his pants.7
Let’s pull one punch. Muzzo coming from material affluence in Vaughan, Ont., the capital of Corruptario graft, understandably helped get good legal counsel. That misses the point that whatever prison term he served never would have been enough.
The outrage is that he is free without ever having to say it flat-out: “I killed four people.” Not to a court, and certainly not to Jennifer Neville-Lake, the mourning mother and daughter. It took him over five years before he “acknowledged the names of the dead for the first time,” but he slipped into the passive-voice disassociative sophistry of “me knowing my actions killed” them.
Good enough for the parole board, which follows direction it takes from the state. A few good editors and producers I have known would have said, ‘Try that again.’
Subsequently, the kill count went up to five. The kids’ father, Edward Lake, died by suicide around Father Day’s in 2022.
People who commit that crime, even if it is deemed less than murder or manslaughter, should have to face up and say, “I killed them.” No one is their worst moment, or their best one. But you did it.
An individual can satisfy the court system that he is unlikely to re-offend, as Muzzo did, to his everlasting mild credit.
Talking out of my arse, a restorative justice punishment for someone who took a life is less about the prison. The truth and consequences must involve having to build the strength and radical honesty to stand in front of a room, a high school assembly maybe, and say, “I killed them.”
‘It should be zero-point-zero’
Back in the ’90s, I remember an assembly kind of like that. A speaker came to my high school one day. He was a former state trooper from Washington who survived a fiery crash after trying to stop a drunk driver. He lost fingertips, the outer parts of his ears, eyebrows, and hair. He needed skin grafts and who knows how much physiotherapy.
In trauma, he found purpose in speaking engagements. He stood up there in front of a gymnasium of 700 or so teenagers to showed that when someone drives impaired, they might be imposing lives-altering injuries on people. Beyond that, he contested the legal limit, pointing it out was arbitrary, a sop to the businesses whose model requires them to sell alcohol.
Why is it point-zero-eight? he posed, as I recall. It should be zero-point-zero.
That is, in fact, a requirement of people who drive for a living, such as city bus operators. But we have a society where You Hafta Drive A Car, and we don’t expect it for everyone else.
That was a great part of public education as I knew it 30 years ago. The adults wanted you to ask why, truly, they did. Why a partial measure for this and not that? They wanted you to get out of your bubble our little corner between Kingston and Napanee.
Digression: bars are the original safe consumption sites. As this is written, hip-hop-hooray, starting Sept. 5 in Ontario those will expand to corner stores, thank you to Dark Lord Stephen Harper and figurehead Premier Doug Ford, with a $225-million assist from taxpayers.8
That is, for those scoring at home, 450 times what my home city’s local government wanted to spend to improve the bike lanes.
Meantime, the safe consumption sites for those other drugs, or othered drugs, are having the screws put to them in Ontario. It will lead to more social murder; those who know the subject are sure of it. But I digress.
Anyone else wanna start the Make It Make Sense Party?
Here in 2024, as an old man, I dunno whether the message would be deemed safe for consumption in a high school. Walk everyone into the gym to listen to a physically scarred dude tell you about something that was effed-up, without any warning? That probably does not happen. Parents would be calling in to ‘advocate’ for the children to shielded from such harsh reality, even though Caden and Jaxony probably watched worse shit on YouTube that morning.
I do not recall the man couching his nearly fatal crash in some message of redemption, resilience, triumph over adversity. The reality was that he managed to wash up downstream despite the choices someone else made upstream. Someone who wanted to drive drunk.
And Marco Muzzo? He will be able to drive again.
News reports stated the Ontario court issued a 12-year driving ban on his conviction in 2016. That will end in 2028. Even if Muzzo was not born on third base, you can picture a court shortening that because You Hafta Have A Car.
That brushes another third rail. Our roadways are, indeed, All About The Car.
I grew up in a rural area, biking on rural roads, sometimes with a ballglove or a road hockey stick along the handlebars. It was three miles from home down County Road 7 to the top of the hill overlooking the lakeside village of Bath, and you always pedaled extra hard just before it so you could coast downhill. Turn right onto the elementary school property if we were playing pick-up baseball, or up the crest of the hill if headed to the basketball courts or a ball hockey game.
I have got on a bike on a so-called ‘shared roadway’ with a protected bike lane exactly once as an adult city dweller. It was scarier and more harrowing than the reason I got on one — there was a showing of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive in 35mm at the Playhouse Cinema inHamilton. And it was more harrowing than what I was avoiding by going to see David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive in 35mm at the Playhouse Cinema in Hamilton.9
Whenever bike lanes or social bicycles are discussed in public forum, it hits a red line. So we do not want people to feel safe when they combine their errands with a bit of exercise, which will show up downstream in better health outcomes? Seriously…
Double minor for soap-boxing, Sager.
Last minute of play
It would be powerful if the NHL, or even hockey fans, took up the fight for cycling safety in the names of Johnny and Matthew Gaudreau if their families bless it. Johnny Gaudreau seemed to get the ties between great privilege and power. For instance, he spoke up for men’s mental health. In Calgary, he put Pride tape on his stick.
I am no commercial artist, but like I said, I kept picturing the Blue Jackets shoulder patch as a Ghost Bike Memorial. And thinking — as an of-Scandinavian-lineage Canadian mind you — that Gaudreau had a fine international hockey résumé. It stings realizing that he never played in a best-on-best Olympic men’s hockey tournament.
Watching Denmark and Nik Ehlers celebrate earning their ticket to Milan-Cortina 2026, I thought of the American star who had the cruelest number of all called.
The eternal butt end can come for anyone, and one knows not when.
Yet we can want better. Or at least an enterprising fan can make a better Ghost Bike logo and print shirts. And know these two athletes dying young was no accident.
I always track a little about everything, which I post regularly to Notes. Otherwise, this is more than enough for now. Please stay safe, and be kind — especially to yourself.
Aug. 29-Sept. 1, 2024
Hamilton, Ont.; traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee, and the Mississaugas.
Rachel Milanta, “For Johnny Gaudreau, Family Shaped Choice To Join Blue Jackets” BetMGM ‘The Roar,’ Aug. 18, 2023.
“Don Cherry blasts bike-riding ‘pinkos,’ ” Canadian Cycling Magazine, Dec. 8, 2010.
Matt Hansen, “A Hamilton driver stalked, targeted, and allegedly ran cyclists off the road,” Canadian Cycling Magazine, June 14, 2024.
From Correctional Service Canada: “an approach to justice that focuses on addressing the harm caused by crime and meeting the needs of those involved. In essence, restorative justice processes provide opportunities for safe and voluntary dialogue between victims, offenders, and communities.” I first learned of it in 1998, when I was (nerd alert) on The Kingston Whig-Standard community editorial board.
Carrie McDonald, “What we know about bike accident that killed Johnny Gaudreau, NHL star,” USA Today, Aug. 30.
Kayla Goodfield, “Marco Muzzo, drunk driver who killed 3 children and grandfather, granted full parole,” CTV News Toronto, Feb. 9. 2021. Paragraphs 12 and 13 of that article are in the screeenshot.
Former prime minister Harper is on the board of Alimentation Couche-Tard, which owns the Circle K stores in Ontario that can now sell alcohol. The day of the Gaudreaus’ alcohol-related killings, Couche-Tard announced it wants to buy the owner of 7-Eleven stores, where it will soon be legal to drink alcohol. Sources: Canadian Convenience Store News, March 22, 2024; Financial Post, Aug. 29, 2024.
To do so, Couche-Tard wants pension fund backing, including one from the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan (OTPP). The OTPP funds the retirements of my mother and high school teachers who helped me develop my values system. The irony!
It was either that or face the possibility of seeing Boston, up 3-2 in the best-of-7 final, win the Stanley Cup. The St. Louis Blues won that night, and took Game 7 to win the Cup. Mulholland Drive was brilliant, even if I had no idea what was going on.