Jones rocks Oly-bound teams

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This article was published 11/01/2010 (6035 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

BERN, Switzerland — Jennifer Jones is not headed to the Vancouver Games, but the Winnipeg skip bested an Olympic-class field Sunday to win the International Bernese Ladies Cup.

Jones defeated Japan’s Olympic representative skipped by Moe Meguro 5-4 in Sunday’s final and eliminated Great Britain’s Olympic squad skipped by Eve Muirhead 3-2 earlier in the semifinal.

Muirhead won the third-place game 8-3 against Austria’s Jacqueline Greiner.

Calgary’s Cheryl Bernard, who will skip Canada’s entry at the Vancouver Games, lost 8-3 to Muirhead in the quarter-finals.

The event featured all 10 women’s Olympic teams, but Sweden’s Anette Norberg, China’s Bingyu Wang, Germany’s Andrea Schopp, Denmark’s Angelina Jensen and Russia’s Ludmila Priwikowa were all eliminated before the playoffs.

Greiner, who like Jones won’t be going to Vancouver, eliminated the Swiss Olympic team skipped by Mirjam Ott in the quarter-finals.

Meguro took out the American Olympic foursome skipped by Debbie McCormick in the quarters.

In Guelph, Ont., Olympic champion Brad Gushue added another line to his curling resumé Sunday, winning the Swiss Chalet National 6-4 over Randy Ferbey.

The victory, worth $24,000, is the first for Gushue on the Capital One Grand Slam of Curling Series. Gushue blasted out a pair of Ferbey stones with his last rock in the eighth end to secure the title.

"We’ve been playing good all year," Gushue, who plays with third Mark Nichols, second Ryan Fry and lead Jamie Korab, said in a news release. "We’ve had four wins before this and to get the fifth at a Grand Slam is nice. This is the best field we’re going to face all year. We played good and we went head to head with a lot of the top teams — Ferbey, Glenn Howard and Mike McEwen — in the last three games. It’s nice to come through with three wins."

The end was shaping up in Ferbey’s favour until Nichols executed a pair of double takeouts to clear the house.

"In the last end, we had the steal setup," Ferbey said. "Mark made a couple good runbacks and got them out of trouble. Looking back, maybe we should have tried something a little different on my first one. That’s what it came down to. I firmly believe we probably had a better chance to win that game if Mark doesn’t make the double runback."

Gushue took control of the game in the fourth end, raising back his own stone to remove a Ferbey counter to score three and take a 4-2 lead.

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After blanking the fifth, Ferbey levelled the score with a deuce in six. Gushue managed to get another blank in the seventh and take the hammer to the eighth end.

Canada’s 2010 Olympic representative Kevin Martin failed to reach the playoffs at the National, the first time in his career he was kept out of the money at a Grand Slam event.

— Canwest News Service