KOE RINK STANDS TALL AT BRIER
Canadian team believes attending Regina celebration after loss was right thing to do
It was like prematurely announcing plans for the parade by a team in the Stanley Cup final, Grey Cup game, Super Bowl or World Series.
You know how that usually works out.
Heading into the medal rounds at the Pyeongchang Olympics, it was announced that Kevin Koe, Marc Kennedy, Brent Laing and Ben Hebert would be celebrated on their return to Canada to open the Regina Brier.
Welcoming Canada’s medal winners at the Brier when they return from the Olympics has been a wonderful part of the proceedings in the past 20 years.
And Canada always returns with a medal — gold in the case of Brad Gushue from 2006, Kevin Martin in 2010 and Brad Jacobs in 2014. Always. Until now.
You’d figure the parade of Koe and mates to the Brier Patch here Friday evening might have been cancelled due to the lack of a medal to bring back from South Korea.
“We gave some consideration to not coming here. But we all felt the same way. We felt that would have sent out the wrong message,” said third Marc Kennedy, who arrived here with his 2010 gold medal in his pocket, but only because he gave a speech in his hometown of St. Albert before catching a plane here from Edmonton Thursday evening.
“This was designed to be a celebration. Just because we didn’t get a medal, we decided we were still members of the Olympic team from our sport and it should be celebrated how great Canada did at the Olympics. I think it would have been a dangerous message to deliver for us to have decided not to come.
“I’ve always been conscious of the fact there are a lot of young eyes on us all the time. It’s important to share our experiences, and not just the good ones.
“We had a lot of people behind us and supporting us and we decided they’d been great to us and we should get out here and talk to the fans, sign some autographs and cheer on the biggest curling competition there is.
“We just felt it would be wrong for us to go somewhere and hide in a corner and lick our wounds. We gave it everything we had and got beat. We didn’t think we should be hiding.”
So there they were at 4 p.m. at the scheduled autograph session at the Brandt Centre on Friday. And there they were again on stage at the Brier Patch later in the evening.
They were delighted they did. “We knew it would help with the whole healing process to get over the devastation of what just happened,” Kennedy said.
“We knew it would be important to show up and talk to those people. We knew it wasn’t going to be easy. It’s not that this happened weeks ago. We’re still dealing with our disappointments.
“I know there are some negative comments out there, but I haven’t had one from the curling community. They’ve supported us all along and been even more supportive now that things didn’t work out.”
Kennedy and Hebert came to the Halifax Brier in 2010 for a celebration with Kevin Martin and John Morris with their Vancouver Olympic medals.
“That was great. It really was a full-on celebration. This wasn’t quite the same, obviously. But we got out and showed our faces,” Kennedy said.
“There were a lot of people who wanted to share their experiences watching our games and ask us questions.”
He said the most asked question from curling fans was “What happened to your draw weight?”
“It’s a fair question. Sometimes if you struggle with draw weight it affects your overall confidence and I think that’s what happened.”
For Kennedy, everything changed after the fifth game when the decision was taken to sandpaper the running face of the rocks to add curl.
“It was a very unusual decision and unfortunately for us, they did it at a time when we were 4-1,” he said. “I was upset because I didn’t think I’d ever curled that well before as I did in the first five games of the Olympics. I felt great. And all of a sudden it changed and we had to adjust and adapt and it was difficult. It was tough. It was hard. We didn’t want to complain and we did our absolute best to adjust. But we were never able to get the same level of play back from our team after they sanded the rocks.”
At the end of the day, Kennedy said, they were still Olympians.
“We were pretty sad and pretty upset. We had some pretty high expectations. Walking away with a medal would have been pretty satisfying, but it didn’t happen.
“We spent the last couple days trying to enjoy the experience. It’s not every day you get to go to the Olympics. We wanted to support the other athletes, go around and do some fun things, and we did. But deep down, our team has been on an incredible journey, so to have it come to an end that way was disappointing. It was devastating.”
We just felt it would be wrong forustogo somewhere and hide in a corner and lick our wounds.