Stoughton may get final word at Olympic event

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This article was published 12/02/2018 (3018 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

GANGNEUNG, South Korea — It took Jeff Stoughton a lifetime to get to the Olympics. It took all of a couple of hours for his famously big mouth to get him into trouble.

It was last Thursday morning and the very first draw of the first ever mixed doubles curling event at the Winter Olympics had just completed and reporters had lots of questions about this quirky new Olympic discipline that amounted to: ‘Why? Why mixed doubles?’

“Why backstroke in swimming?” Stoughton bristled.

“Why the front crawl? It’s just something different we do on the same sheet of ice.”

The problem was two-fold. First, no one was asking Stoughton — he was just hanging around the mixed zone media area in his role as Canada’s national team coach when the question was posed to Canadian curlers Kaitlyn Lawes and John Morris.

And second — what? Backstroke and front-crawl are different disciplines in swimming because they are practised all over the world, by millions of people a day at all levels of swimming. Everyone gets that.

You could pack all the people in the world who play mixed doubles curling with any regularity into a McDonald’s built two years ago — and still have room for Ronald.

The sharks smelled blood. “Why so touchy?,” wrote Globe and Mail columnist Cathal Kelly. “If you weren’t wondering about the viability of the sport beforehand, you were certainly left in that position after Stoughton’s answer.”

“A lousy analogy,” was Toronto Star columnist Rosie DiManno’s blunt assessment of Stoughton’s interjection.

It was, of course, vintage Stoughton.

A man almost as famous in Winnipeg for his mouth off the ice as he is for his legendary deft touch on it has never been shy about offering his opinions, and he wasn’t about to dial it back simply because they’d slapped five rings on this bonspiel.

But he learned. Once bitten, Stoughton has been uncommonly shy here ever since, racing through the mixed zone with a lightning speed not seen at an IOC sanctioned event since sprinter Usain Bolt hung up his cleats.

Having lifted his head out of the foxhole last Thursday and immediately gotten his helmet blown off, Stoughton decided to let Lawes and Morris do the talking ever since — and let the Canadian mixed doubles program that Stoughton built from the ground up speak for itself.

It’s spoken all right — in ear-splitting volumes that scream Canada is going to kick ass in mixed doubles exactly like we’ve always kicked ass in men’s and women’s curling.

With a berth in today’s gold-medal game against Switzerland (5 a.m. CT, CBC), a Canadian mixed doubles program that had been a joke until Stoughton took it over three years ago is now just one win away from proving it is the best in the world.

You’ve come a long way, baby. Prior to Stoughton taking over the program in 2015, Canada had cracked the top four at the mixed doubles world championship — yes, that’s a thing — just once, a third-place finish in 2009.

Aside from that, it was bupkis for Canada in a discipline that the rest of the world — heck, even New Zealand finished second once — was taking seriously a lot earlier than we did.

It wasn’t until mixed doubles was granted full medal status at the Olympics that Canada finally got interested and hired Stoughton — who has two Canadian mixed titles to go along with his three Brier titles and two world titles in men’s curling — to put together a credible program pronto.

So what did that look like? Stoughton had to start from scratch. From running mixed doubles clinics around the country to building a credible mixed doubles tour out of thin air so Canadians could get some experience in the discipline, it has been almost like a second full-time job for Stoughton, who also works for Air Canada.

It tells you how much catching up Stoughton had to do that there was a chance right up until last year that Canada wouldn’t qualify a team for these Olympics because we had performed so poorly internationally.

It took Winnipeg’s Reid Carruthers and Edmonton’s Joanne Courtney finishing second at last year’s worlds to finally give Canada enough points to send a mixed doubles team here.

Thank God for Winnipeg, right? Indeed, this entire mixed doubles story here has been a Winnipeg tale even more than it has been a Canada tale.

Lawes? Native Winnipegger. Morris? Born in Winnipeg. Stoughton? Greatest men’s curler to ever come out of Winnipeg. Carruthers? Saved our bacon.

They should hand out the medals in this event at Portage and Main instead of the Olympic medal plaza.

To his credit, Stoughton has wanted none of the credit. When I tracked him down this week, he gave all the credit for everything good that has happened to Canada here to the two people wearing the Maple Leaf on the ice.

It’s the only thing I expected him to say. While it is considered de rigeur by almost all elite teams to have a curling coach these days, Stoughton never really bothered with one in his 25-year career.

Having disdained the utility of the curling coach during his playing career, it’s not like Stoughton could — or would — take any credit for anything he’s done for Lawes and Morris as their coach.

But make no mistake — this is a profoundly satisfying moment for a man for whom the Olympics was the only thing missing from a hall of fame curling resumé.

Stoughton came as close as you can come — literally less than a centimetre — from qualifying for the Torino Games, losing a tenth-end measure at the Canadian Curling Trials in 2005 that sent Brad Gushue to Italy instead.

It took Stoughton years to get over that loss, so I wondered over the past few days whether there was any feeling of redemption now, having shepherded Canada’s mixed doubles team to the precipice of Olympic gold.

Stoughton’s answer sounded to me like no, not really. “It’s so long ago now,” Stoughton said Monday after Canada defeated Norway in the semifinal to advance to the gold-medal game.

“It’s not like I’m living it now like it was back then. This is just a brand-new experience.”

Stoughton came within a breath — again literally — of also missing this Olympic experience. Last summer, doctors split Stoughton’s chest open and removed a growth the size of a tennis ball from his upper chest.

The growth mercifully turned out to be benign, but Stoughton told me at the mixed doubles trials in Portage last month that he spent a lot of sleepless nights in the lead-up to that surgery wondering if he’d live long enough to see these Olympics, much less take part.

Just making it here, after all those years of trying and all those close calls, was a victory, the exclamation point on a remarkable career and the reward for all that effort.

They don’t hand out medals to coaches at the Olympics and so Stoughton will just have to watch from the sidelines, as he’s done here all week, when Lawes and Morris climb the podium at the medals plaza to receive their medals.

In that remarkable moment, an Olympic experience that started last week with Stoughton getting brow-beaten for speaking up when no one was asking him will end this week with him getting the final word, without saying anything at all.

email: paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @PaulWiecek