Unbeaten Carey rink into women’s final at Olympic trials
Calgary-based team one win away from ticket to 2018 PyeongChang Winter Games
Chelsea Carey was not about to start patting herself on the back when there is still so much work to be done.
“I don’t think there’s any happy-to-be-there feeling amongst us,” Carey said.
The Calgary-based skip punched a ticket to Sunday’s final of the Canadian Olympic curling trials by beating Krista McCarville of Thunder Bay, Ont., 5-2 and Michelle Englot of Winnipeg 10-3 on Thursday to run her record to a perfect 8-0.
Hers is the first women’s team in the history of the Olympic trials to go undefeated in the round robin.
“None of it matters unless you go undefeated through the whole thing,” Carey said. “It’s great, but it’s meaningless if you don’t win that last game.”
The Winnipeg native and her team of Cathy Overton-Clapham, Jocelyn Peterman and Laine Peters will play either Ottawa’s Rachel Homan (6-1) or Winnipeg’s Jennifer Jones (5-2) in the final at 2 p.m. ET at the Canadian Tire Centre.
Jones and Homan will play in the semifinal Saturday at 2 p.m. They were on the ice in a headto-head matchup Friday night that didn’t have much meaning. A Homan win would give her choice of rocks and the hammer in the semifinal, while a Jones win would give her team a choice of rocks or hammer.
The winner of Sunday’s final will represent Canada at the
2018 Olympic Winter Games in PyeongChang, South Korea, from Feb. 9-25.
“It’s hard to wrap my head around it right now,” Carey said. “All you can ask for is to be in that game. That’s all everyone wants all week. If you’re not in the game, you’re not in the Olympics, so that’s what we were looking for all week. We feel really good about how we’ve been playing and we’re happy to have a chance at it.”
Carey, the 2016 Canadian champion, has been the star of the week at the trials.
Her team has won games in many different ways — last-rock finesse shots, precise takeouts, blowouts, steals.
All the while, the skip has been playing with a heavy heart. Carey’s grandfather, John Demkiw, died at age 93 just as the Olympic trials were beginning.
She missed his funeral and was upset about that, but it didn’t affect her on the ice — she just kept on winning.
Now she just needs one more and she’ll be the envy of every curler in Canada.
“I’ve always been a big believer that there’s a lot of destiny involved in an event like this so for me, my job is to prepare as much as I can,” Carey said. “I’ve done that, we’ve all done that, leading up. Then you come out in the final and you allow your training to take over as much as you can and you just hope it’s your day.”
Jones is the 2014 Olympic champion, while Homan is the defending world women’s champion.
Still, the team that has earned the bye into the final has won the Olympic trials nine times out of 10 so far in the men’s and women’s divisions. That clearly puts the odds in Carey’s favour.
On top of that, there just seems to be something special brewing with this team.
Overton-Clapham, a fivetime Canadian champion who joined the team at the end of last season, had a feeling something good was in the cards earlier this fall.
“A few months ago I did say to (Peters) that I thought we had a good chance,” Overton-Clapham said. “As we were walking off the ice (Friday) I said, ‘Who knew?’ and she said, ‘You knew.’”