Mixed-doubles event cancellation disappoints Olympic curling hopefuls

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This article was published 26/12/2021 (1614 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Canada will hand-pick a team to defend its Olympic title in mixed-doubles curling at the upcoming Winter Games after this week’s qualifying event in Portage la Prairie was taken out by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The rising number of cases among athletes heading to the Olympic Trials and steadily increasing cases across the country “made it impossible to stage the event in a safe, responsible manner for athletes, staff and volunteers,” Curling Canada said Sunday, in a statement.

Sixteen teams were slated to compete Tuesday through Sunday at Stride Place, to represent Canada in early February in Beijing. Ticket refunds to spectators are still being arranged.

Instead, the federation will appoint a two-person mixed team to wear the Maple Leaf in China.

No fewer than seven curlers with Manitoba roots were in the mix, including two-time reigning Scotties four-player women’s champion Kerri Einarson of Camp Morton and her partner, 2014 men’s gold medallist Brad Jacobs of Sault Ste. Marie, Ont.

“I kind of figured it was going to happen with some of the cases on some of the teams, but I was still upset about the news. But everyone’s health and safety is more important,” said Einarson.

Einarson united with Brad Gushue of St. John’s, N.L., to win the 2021 Canadian mixed doubles title in the Calgary bubble last spring, however, Gushue who will skip his four-player men’s team in Beijing. So, she recruited a world-class replacement.

Both skips fell short at the four-player Trials in Saskatoon in late November and were pumped for another opportunity to get to the Olympics.

“Oh, my gosh, we were so excited to play together,” she said. “I know (Jacobs) has never played (mixed doubles) before and he was excited to do something different. It’s really too bad.”

As for being Canada’s nominee?

“I’m holding out some hopes but I’m just not sure. Whoever they choose, it’ll be a great representative,” said Einarson.

In mixed doubles, one player throws the first and fifth stones and the other delivers the second through fourth rocks in an eight-end game. The team with last-rock advantage starts each end with a counter in the house behind an opposing team’s guard.

International countries have excelled in mixed doubles for a decade, although Canada demonstrated at the last Winter Olympics it is gaining ground. Winnipeg’s Kaitlyn Lawes and John Morris of Canmore, Alta., stood atop the medal podium in Pyeongchang.

The duo won’t return to defend the gold medal, as Lawes and her teammates on the Jennifer Jones squad out of Winnipeg will compete in the Olympics’ four-player women’s event.

Instead, Morris will partner with Ontario’s Rachel Homan, and that alignment will rate strong consideration from Curling Canada’s high-performance staff.

In late March, Einarson and Gushue defeated the Gimli-area duo of Colton Lott and Kadriana Sahaidak in the Calgary bubble. The young Manitoba couple, ranked ninth in the country, was shocked and disappointed by the cancellation of the Portage event.

“We were pretty confident (going in). Obviously, we’re always still a bit of an underdog but I believe we had a good chance, and it would have been nice to show everybody that,” said Lott.

He’d like to believe the team will be in the conversation for selection.

“You never know exactly how they’re going to go about it, but it would be nice to think that would be the case. It would have been nice to show everyone our talent this coming week and play in front of all our friends and family, too,” said Lott.

“We’ve done what we can. We started at the beginning of this quadrennial and we’ve had great success along the way. Just like any of these teams, we’ve all worked hard.”

Colin Hodgson, who curls out of West St. Paul but lives in Red Lake, Ont., and former Winnipegger Chelsea Carey, now out of Calgary, were in the field, along with Selena Njegovan of Winnipeg and teammate Brent Laing of Horseshoe Valley, Ont., and Shannon Birchard of Winnipeg and partner Catlin Schneider of Regina.

Hodgson and Carey earned one of the final two berths to the Trials just two weeks ago at a bonspiel in Brantford, Ont.

“It was a long and tough road to qualify, and we put in a lot of time and effort and our own money into it, and it’s unfortunate,” said Hodgson. “It started to become very doubtful last week when I started hearing from a lot of different friends in various spots in North America, and hearing stuff behind the scenes. It was discouraging.”

A team from Ontario was forced to pull out after a positive test for the virus just days before Christmas. Since that time, several athletes also tested positive.

Said Curling Canada: “Unlike the Calgary bubble, which had months of preparation time and allowed athletes to self-isolate at home, and get tests done prior to their departure for the events, the dramatic rise in positive cases related to the sudden emergence of the Omicron variant across Canada in the past week made those safety precautions impossible to carry out.”

The curling couple of Jocelyn Peterman and Brett Gallant would be a possibility to play on behalf of Canada in mixed doubles, as each is already going to the Games. Peterman is second for Jones, while Gallant is second for Gushue.

But Curling Canada said in the past it refused to permit a curler from competing in more than one discipline.

Nancy Martin of Saskatoon and Tyrel Griffith, Kelowna, B.C., are also a highly regarded duo on the world mixed doubles stage.

jason.bell@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @WFPJasonBell