Word of Ovechkin\u2019s appearance apparently spread quickly, and more fans showed up at the store as the afternoon progressed hoping to get a glimpse of him and possibly an autograph. Ovechkin, who turned 40 on Sept. 17, will begin his 21st NHL season when Washington hosts the Boston Bruins at Capital One Arena on Oct. 8 (7:30 p.m. ET; HBO MAX, TNT).<\/p>\n
The Capitals captain has been nursing a minor lower-body injury that has kept him out of practice since he left a few minutes into his first training camp practice on Thursday. He skated on his own before practice Tuesday, though, and said he expects to skate with the team Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Before that, he stopped into Giant to lend a hand and spread the word about \u201cOvi\u2019s Great Crunch.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is incredible chance when you have the greatest local hockey star, the premiere (athlete) of Washington, DC, come to a grocery store like Giant,\u201d Arons said. \u201cIt means the world. Every customer, all the kids, all the fans, all the associates had just like the most amazing time seeing Alex run around the store and do what we do every day.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ovechkin completed his visit by joining some kids shooting at a net outside the store\u2019s front entrance and passing along some pointers.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s great,\u201d Ovechkin said. \u201cI\u2019m sure people enjoy it, people love it, and we enjoy it, too.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is the second time Ovechkin has teamed with Giant Foods on a limited-edition cereal. \u201cOvi O\u2019s\u201d, a honey-nut cereal, sold out within days of its release in September 2019. A portion of the proceeds from \u201cOvi\u2019s Great Crunch\u201d will benefit THE GR8 CHASE for Victory Over Cancer, a campaign supporting pediatric cancer research that Ovechkin launched in March along with the Capitals, Hockey Fights Cancer and The V Foundation for Cancer Research.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe secret is Ovi loves cereal,\u201d Arons said. \u201cWe did something special a few years ago with \u2018Ovi O\u2019s\u2019, but when he broke Wayne Gretzky\u2019s record, we said, \u2018How do we do something truly special to celebrate this?\u2019 And it was cereal. The cereal to me tastes great. It\u2019s a bran flake, so it\u2019s just a regular kind of crunchy, flakey cereal, but what\u2019s fun is that you can add whatever you want to it. So, the kids got to put blueberries, chocolate chips, honey, cinnamon, all different types of things to really amp it up.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Word of Ovechkin\u2019s appearance apparently spread quickly, and more fans showed up at the store as the afternoon…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":164755,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[433],"tags":[49,48,448,82],"class_list":["post-164754","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164754","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=164754"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164754\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/164755"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=164754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=164754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=164754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}