IIHF president Rene Fasel.

BY MIKE BROPHY
sportsnet.ca

International Ice Hockey Federation president Rene Fasel has apologized to Sidney Crosby after his organization criticized the Pittsburgh captain for not participating in the world hockey championship.

Hockey Canada president Bob Nicholson told Sportsnet's John Shannon that Fasel phoned Crosby's agent, Pat Brisson, to apologize for an article that appeared on the IIHF website. The article was written by the IIHF's communications director and criticized Crosby and other players, including Detroit's Henrik Zetterberg and Washington's Nicklas Backstrom, for not suiting up for their respective countries.

"I sincerely believe that Rene Fasel was sorry for the inappropriate comments made towards Sidney and the other players," Brisson told The Canadian Press.

"We are disappointed with the column that appeared on the IIHF website and expressed this to the IIHF," Nicholson told reporters before Canada's quarter-final game against Russia on Thursday. "We feel that it is disrespectful to single out players or countries without having all the information and speaking to the federations that were singled out."

The story, written by Szymon Szemberg, suggested some players make up lame excuses to not participate in the annual event which rarely attracts all the best players in the world because many are still participating in National Hockey League playoffs.

In the story, Szemberg lists a bunch of tongue-in-cheek reasons why players do not elect to play in the tournament: "I am tired; I am not motivated and I am thus of no use to the team; I am injured (but if my team had advanced to the next round of the playoffs I would have played); I don't want to leave my family, etc."

Nicholson asked the IIHF to remove the story from its website, but as of Thursday afternoon it remained posted.

"The Federation article is so very wrong," Nicholson told Shannon. "The Federation has no feelings for its member clubs or its players."

Of Crosby, Szemberg wrote: "Why is a 22-year-old Sidney Crosby tired when a 34-year-old Ryan Smyth is answering the bell for his country despite having represented Canada at the Worlds already on eight occasions?"

Szemberg also writes: "How can a player who is 22 or 25 or 27, and who has just been eliminated from the playoffs, be tired? Tired is a miner who works in a damp pit in Miktivka, in the Donetz Plateau in Ukraine, who never sees daylight and who provides living for a family of five in a modest two-room apartment. That's tired."