Ottawa hogging curling spotlight

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This article was published 05/03/2016 (3791 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

 OTTAWA — It’s been 15 years since the Brier was last played in Ottawa.

But after a lengthy absence, the nation’s capital is suddenly Canadian curling central again, playing host to two major curling events in just more than a year.

The first one, of course, is the ongoing Tim Hortons Brier, which is being played in the arena formerly known as the Ottawa Civic Centre that is now part of a gorgeous sports, retail and residential development that also houses the Ottawa Redblacks and goes by the name TD Place.

But the bigger show will come in December 2017 when the Canadian Curling Trials — which will determine Canada’s men’s and women’s curling representatives for the 2018 Winter Olympics — is played just a few kilometres away in Kanata at the home of the NHL’s Ottawa Senators, Canadian Tire Centre.

This year’s Brier and next year’s Trials are linked by more than just their location. Under a new Trials qualification process put in place for this Olympic quadrennial, the winner of the Brier final next Sunday will get a berth into the 2017 Trials — but only if they also medal at next month’s world men’s curling championship in Basel, Switzerland.

The demand the Canadian champion this year and again next year medal at the worlds before they can claim their Trials spot — the same caveat applies to the Canadian women’s champions — is a new hurdle Curling Canada has put in place for this go-around.

“We wanted to further strengthen the Trials qualifying process,” Gerry Peckham, Curling Canada’s director of high performance, said Saturday.

“We know that the possibility always exists that all the best teams in the country might not be in the Scotties or the Brier. And we just saw that at the Scotties, where some of the elite teams you’d normally expect to be there were missing.

“What we’re trying to say is that if a team doesn’t medal at the worlds, maybe that’s indicative the field at the Briers or Scotties was weaker.”

Put another way — if you want to represent Canada at the Olympics, you have to show you can beat Sweden and Scotland and not just Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick.

Easy, right? Not necessarily. Canada doesn’t dominate at the worlds like we once did. Canadian men have a record 34 world titles, but haven’t been in the final in either of the last two years and missed the playoffs as recently as 2014. And Canadian women haven’t won a world championship since 2008 and failed to medal as recently as 2009.

The new Trials qualification system is a bit a hybrid of the processes used in the last two quadrennials. Teams qualified automatically for the 2009 Trials in part by simply winning the Brier and Scotties, while teams in the last quadrennial qualified either through a points-based system or by winning the Canada Cup cashspiel.

Teams can still win a Trials spot this time around by simply winning the Canada Cup — much to the chagrin of Manitoba’s Mike McEwen, who had a golden chance in December at locking down the first spot into the 2017 Trials but lost the Canada Cup final to Alberta’s Kevin Koe.

The good news for McEwen is he will get a second golden opportunity at a Trials spot here over the coming week in his first appearance at the Brier. 

paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @PaulWiecek