Olympic meltdown just a blip on radar

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This article was published 15/02/2019 (2653 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

SYDNEY, N.S. — The Olympics, Emma Miskew thinks, weren’t as bad as the headlines made them seem. To read the critics, her team’s showing there was nothing short of catastrophic, a derailment at speed, a disaster.

It’s not that the Team Rachel Homan third is offended by those comments, she adds. The facts are what they are: in PyeongChang, the foursome slumped to a toothless 4-5 finish, despite coming in as heavy favourites.

They may never get back to an Olympics. As Jennifer Jones knows, repeat trips are easier said than done. So to watch their golden hopes melt into the pebble, yeah, that was hard; but it was never the end of Team Homan.

“We had one bad event, and then everybody thought we were spiralling or something,” Miskew says. “We get asked that a lot: ‘Oh, what turned around for you?’ Well, we just had one bad event, and actually it was the other way. Things turned around the other way.”

So fair enough, it’s not a turnaround that Homan’s team has made target practice out of their competition this season. Yet it’s hard to see their lightning-fast return to curling dominance as anything other than a statement.

The record speaks for itself. So far, Team Homan has won five of their season’s nine major events, and never finished lower than fourth. They are now so far atop the Canadian team standings that nobody — not second-place Kerri Einarson, not third-ranked Jones — even comes close to toppling them.

So they will come into the 2019 Scotties Tournament of Hearts as the No. 1 seed, and there’s no question they deserve it. The difference is that, these days, they don’t take it for granted — especially, Miskew says, not after missing the Scotties three years ago, following an upset in the Ontario playdowns.

They’ve climbed to the heights of this sport. In Sydney this week, they will have a chance to once again reach the summit. But they know how quickly bad shots can pile up and send them sliding back down the mountain, so right now, Miskew says, they’re just excited to get started.

“You can’t guarantee anything,” Miskew says, chatting after practice at the Sydney’s Centre 200 arena on Friday.

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“We were working hard before the Olympics, and it didn’t work out, and we’re working hard right now, and we’ve had a good season so far. That’s what sport is.”

Whatever happens this week, change is coming to Team Homan. The skip is pregnant with her first child, due this summer; so is second Joanne Courtney. They’ve said they’re taking it year by year, but that doesn’t mean they’re thinking of splitting up, either.

“For us, we’re having so much fun that unless something happened, it’s not really year by year,” Miskew says. “It’s just that’s how we’re viewing our seasons in general. We’re not thinking about it as, ‘the Olympics are four years away, this is year one, we’ll play a little bit less…’

“The Olympics isn’t everything about curling,” Miskew adds, and it has the feel of a hard-earned wisdom. “There’s so much in between that’s so enjoyable. And if you focus too much on that one event, it just is a lot of weight on your shoulders for not only the trials, but the actual Olympic Games.”

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca

Melissa Martin
Reporter-at-large

Melissa Martin reports and opines for the Winnipeg Free Press.

Every piece of reporting Melissa produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.