‘I just want to give her a hug’: After Olympic curling heartbreak, Team Jones felt Rachel Homan’s pain an ocean away

Opinion

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This article was published 16/02/2022 (1301 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

BEIJING—Riding a three-game winning streak into Wednesday night’s draw, things seemed like they might be turning around for Jennifer Jones at the Olympic women’s curling tournament.

But that didn’t stop Team Jones from sparing a few moments to lend support to a fellow Olympian who couldn’t claim to be in such a sunny place. In a social media post Wednesday Canadian curler Rachel Homan began by congratulating childhood friend and Canadian speedskater Ivanie Blondin on her gold medal in team pursuit. Then Homan, who along with partner John Morris failed to make the playoffs in mixed doubles earlier in the Games, acknowledged her own post-Olympic experience had been anything but celebratory.

“I know many athletes have felt this but I’m in the deepest of black holes wishing we could have found another centimetre for Canada,” Homan wrote on Twitter. “Know that I’m cheering hard for every athlete in Beijing right now but personally struggling beyond words.”

It was heart-wrenching stuff that pointed out a difficult truth. If it’s hard to win at the Olympics, sometimes it’s even harder to lose.

Team Jones would get reacquainted with that feeling later Wednesday, when they squandered an 8-5 lead en route to an 11-9 extra-end loss to China. The loss, which dropped Jones to 4-4 on the tournament, didn’t eliminate the Canadians from playoff contention but it dealt a gut punch to their chances. It meant they’ll need a win in Thursday’s round-robin capper against Denmark. And even with a win, there are scenarios that could see them bounced in a multi-team tiebreaker.

Jones, who missed a runback double for the win in the 11th, acknowledged she and her teammates had let a prime opportunity slip through their fingers.

“That was a game we really wanted to win, so obviously it’s disappointing,” Jones said. “That one (missed shot in the eighth end), I rolled millimetres too far. A game of millimetres, right?”

Indeed, it was only a few hours earlier that Jones and her team had been talking about how well they could relate to Homan’s lament about missing out on playing for a medal by “another centimetre.”

“I know many athletes have felt this but I’m in the deepest of black holes wishing we could have found another centimetre for Canada.”–Rachel Homan

“For us, we’re lucky that millimetres don’t mean we’re going to hurt and break a bone, or do something unfortunate like that,” said Kaitlyn Lawes, Jones’s third. “For us it’s just being able to appreciate the moment, appreciate the opportunity and try and move forward. Because at the end of the day, you can’t control the outcome. You just have to try and give it your all. You have to be proud of the performance you put on no matter what. I know that it’s hard because some people say, ‘Oh, (Homan and Morris) underperformed.’ And, ‘They didn’t win a medal.’ But honestly, anything can happen. I think she should be very proud of their efforts. They worked so hard.”

While Team Jones’s playoff fate was in limbo, things were going better for Canada on the men’s side of the tournament, where Brad Gushue’s 5-3 record heading into Thursday had already clinched his rink a berth in the four-team playoff for the medals. For Gushue, who won Olympic gold in 2006, another trip to a second career Olympic podium stood a semifinal win away.

There are no guarantees, though. And Team Jones’s Olympic run has been a living example of slim margin for error in the international game. Though the Canadian women had engineered an impressive turnaround before Wednesday night’s loss to China — winning three straight games after losing three straight — Jones said their form hadn’t dramatically changed.

“As much as it is a turnaround, because now we’re winning as opposed to not winning, in the losses I didn’t feel like we were playing that badly,” Jones said before the loss to China. “We just had to eliminate a couple of mistakes and things would turn our way. And that’s what’s happening.”

It wasn’t long after she said those words that Jones put in a subpar performance in which she was thoroughly outcurled by Chinese skip Wang Rui. Even then, Lawes estimated that Jones missed her final shot by what amounted to a centimetre.

“At the end of the day, you can’t control the outcome. You just have to try and give it your all. You have to be proud of the performance you put on no matter what.”–Kaitlyn Lawes

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“And yeah, millimetres. That’s just the way it goes sometimes, unfortunately,” Lawes had said earlier in the day, reacting to Homan’s tweet. “We’ve all lost really big games like that. We’ve lost by millimetres, measurements. It’s hard. But it’s sport. There’s still lots of great, positive things to come from it.”

You’ll understand why Homan might not see it that way, at least at a moment when Canada is celebrating the successes of so many of her peers. While Homan is, by any measure, one of the country’s most successful curlers — she’s a three-time national champion who won the world title in 2017 — the Olympics haven’t been a showcase for her best stuff. In Pyeongchang four years ago she led a women’s team that finished with a 4-5 record and failed to make the playoffs. Combined with Kevin Koe’s fourth-place finish, it marked the first time since curling was made a fixture on the Olympic calendar in 1998 that Canada had been left off the podium in the men’s and women’s curling, let alone in the same Games.

Such is the camaraderie in the curling community that Team Jones felt Homan’s pain from an ocean away. In a sport where it’s so easy to find oneself on the wrong side of the centimetre, maybe the measurement that counts is the size of one’s heart.

“I just want to give her a hug, honestly,” said Lawes of Homan. “She has nothing to feel ashamed of. She is a two-time Olympian and worked her butt off. Sport, you never know what’s going to happen, and that’s why we play. I wish I could give her a hug. There are brighter days ahead for her. She’s going to be back, I know that.”

Dave Feschuk is a Toronto-based sports columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @dfeschuk

“Sport, you never know what’s going to happen, and that’s why we play.”–Kaitlyn Lawes