Ace icemaker Wuthrich rides to rescue at worlds On 2

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This article was published 05/04/2009 (6331 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

MONCTON, N.B. — They avoided the Great Moncton Meltdown in more ways than one Saturday night at the Moncton Coliseum.

On an unseasonably warm day in the Maritimes, Manitoba icemaker Hans Wuthrich somehow found a way to keep the water frozen on the first day of the Ford world men’s curling championship.

And Team Canada’s Kevin Martin somehow found a way to not only deal with the frosty ice (excess frost is a nightmare for curlers) but also a stubborn Japanese team skipped by Yusuke Morozumi.

In the end, Martin prevailed 7-4 over the Japanese to open his title defence in style, but it was a grind because of the ice.

“We didn’t take any chances. At all,” said Martin, backed up by third John Morris, second Marc Kennedy and lead Ben Hebert. “We just basically played it the way we thought we’d have to — stay close for the first few ends and try to break it open in the middle ends and carry it through. I definitely didn’t want to have to draw four-foot in the end.”

Temperatures outside the Coliseum reached 16 C during the afternoon draw, and Wuthrich was predicting “an absolute disaster” for the evening draw when the crowd was expected to be bigger to watch Canada’s debut.

“It’s a little bit of a sauna out there,” said Scotland’s David Murdoch, after losing in the afternoon draw to Switzerland. “The sweepers are definitely going to lose some weight.”

“It’s brutal out there,” added Swiss skip Ralph Stoeckli. “I’m not even sweeping, and I’m completely soaked.”

It’s hardly news that an icemaker gets a little panicked on occasion about ice conditions, but his concerns seemed valid because of a lack of air conditioning in the building; so valid, in fact, that he convinced organizers to delay the evening draw by 30 minutes to allow him enough time to get the ice playable.

“He’s one of the best icemakers who ever lived, and he’s got the perfect storm for disaster,” said Russ Howard, the two-time world champ who’s coaching the Swiss here. “You have high humidity in New Brunswick, hotter than normal temperatures, a ridiculously long opening ceremony (three-plus hours on Friday night in front of a packed house of 6,000) that warmed the building up… But I can’t believe they kept pebble on the ice for three hours. He deserves a gold medal for what he did today.”

Cooler temperatures are predicted for tonday.

Canada and Japan played a tight first four ends, trading single points, and Martin had to work for his points, particularly in the third end when he had to make a delicate angle tap to the button.

But in the fifth, Martin finally pounced on some Japanese misses to put a game-turning three on the board.

“That was a challenge,” said a sweat-soaked Kennedy. “It was just patience, right. You gotta be patient, patient, patient. Kevin dumbed the game down a little bit, which isn’t fun. Not the funnest game to play. Probably not the funnest game to watch.”

Canada returns to the ice today for games against Thomas Dufour of France (1-0) at 11 a.m. and Fengchun Wang of China (0-1) at 5:30 p.m. Both games will be televised by TSN.

— Canwest News Service