MONTREAL — Bruny Surin thought it was a hoax.

McGill University’s historic track and field program is a fixture in Canada’s amateur sports landscape so when word flashed across Surin's phone that the school was scrapping it after 125 years, the Olympic champion sprinter didn’t buy it.

"To me, that news is a nightmare,” Surin said in a phone interview Thursday. “To tell you the truth, I saw it first on Instagram and I was like, OK, well, like our friend in the States likes to say, ‘It's fake news.’

“I didn't believe it.”

Surin, a 4x100 gold medallist at the 1996 Olympics, is among a long list of Canadian athletes expressing their disappointment after McGill announced last week it will cut 25 sports teams because an internal audit and external review made it clear the “current structure

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