Einarson eyes global domination

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 09/03/2020 (2253 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

After the Scotties was over, when she was settled back home with the whirlwind behind her, Kerri Einarson sat down and watched the moment she became a Canadian champion again. Not the whole of the championship final, just the last couple of ends, the ones where her Maple Leaf dreams rode on each shot. 

Those were two ends for the ages, seared into the memory of anyone who watched. It’s hard to forget how the skip and her Team Manitoba held on against a late-game onslaught from Ontario’s Rachel Homan; even harder to forget how the camera caught the journey of those long minutes playing out in her eyes. 

“Wow, the emotion going through my face,” says Einarson, chatting to media at Fort Rouge Curling Club on Monday morning. “I was like, ‘Oh God.’ But it’s awesome. It gives you goosebumps every time you watch it. But now I’m putting that back and focusing on what we have to work on now.” 

What she has to work on now, of course, is becoming the next world champion. On Wednesday, Einarson, third Val Sweeting, second Shannon Birchard and lead Briane Meilleur will depart for Prince George, B.C. to face the world’s 12 other top-ranked national champion teams, in a tournament set to begin Saturday. 

The field is daunting. It includes reigning Olympic champion and two-time world finalist Anna Hasselborg of Sweden; 2013 world champion Eve Muirhead of Scotland; and Japan’s 2018 Olympic bronze medalist Satsuki Fujisawa, one of a surge of talented teams from Asia making a splash on the world scene. 

In a field like that, making it to the end is no cakewalk for Canada: last year, Chelsea Carey went 6-6 through the round robin and missed out on playoffs. Of the Einarson four, only Birchard has been to worlds before, when she went as fifth for Jennifer Jones’s unbeaten run to the 2018 world gold medal. 

That experience will come in handy, given the pressure. World championships are as long as Canadian national tournaments in terms of days, but “it actually feels almost longer than the Scotties,” Birchard says. They will play every other team in the field at least once; the depth of the schedule is “maybe a little bit daunting.” 

But there’s an antidote to that, which is to keep focused on the immediate tasks ahead. 

“We just have to remember to take it one game at a time, and remember to not look too far ahead, and really enjoy the experience,” Birchard says. “That’s the biggest thing. We can’t put too much pressure on ourselves. It’s an honour to represent Canada.” 

The good news is, they’ve had time to rest. After that emotional Scotties final, the team took a week away from the ice to relax and let the magnitude of what they had done sink in. The national championship is always a hard grind, but this year in Moose Jaw felt like a whole world; recalibrating for the next challenge takes time. 

“It’s extremely mentally and physically exhausting, that week,” Birchard says. “There are so many hurdles you have to get over, and you’re really just running on fumes at the end, it’s all adrenaline. So there is a bit of a comedown the week after when it’s all flushing out of your system. It’s kind of hard to get back to real life a little bit.” 

Maybe they’re still not quite there. The spotlight is on them now, and it started at home. The last two weeks have been busy. There have been sponsors to manage, media calls to make, and on Friday the team was given a wild send-off party at their home Gimli Curling Club, packed by over 300 people. 

Einarson got to throw out a ceremonial fish at an ice fishing tournament in Gimli, and spoke to students at her twin daughters’ school. Her six-year-old girls, Kamryn and Khloe, thrilled to show off their Canadian champion mom to their friends; they even sang a song, Carrie Underwood’s “Champion,” to the class in her honour. 

“It’s been amazing,” Einarson says, of this sudden rush of local celebrity. “You just gotta take it all in. Going to the schools and talking to the kids, they were all so excited. I got over, like, 200 some posters at home. I actually went through all of them, and they’re pretty cute.” 

So they have the cheering section, young and old. They have the Team Canada gear, which arrived Friday. They have their work cut out for them in Prince George. And they have this knowledge: if they perform the way they did in Moose Jaw, they stand a good chance at shooting for gold. 

“We want to just take one game at a time, and I think if we play like we can we’ll definitely be in the hunt for the playoffs,” Einarson says. 

One last note. Over the last weeks, efforts to prevent the spread of COVID-19 has wreaked havoc on many events; on Saturday the IIHF announced it was cancelling the women’s world hockey championship, which had been slated to start in Nova Scotia later this month. 

As of Monday, the World Curling Federation is still prepared to move forward with the women’s worlds. They did circulate a list of protocols and precautions to players, and Einarson and her teammates all agreed that they felt confident going into the event. 

“We know that they wouldn’t be allowing this competition to go on if they didn’t feel that us athletes would be safe,” Birchard says. “As long as we follow the protocols that we’ve been given, I think there’s no reason for us to worry.”

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca