ROCKY ROAD
Sweden’s Edin hitting speed bump after speed bump
LAS VEGAS — The way Niklas Edin’s luck has been running, this might not be the perfect place for him to be curling.
First, he loses the goldmedal game at the Olympics to John Shuster of the United States. Then, he finds out the Swedish Olympic committee is broke and won’t be able to fund athletes like in the past. And then he discovers he needs two more surgeries this summer, the seventh and eighth of his career.
Edin has no intention of letting any of the above amount to anything more than speed bumps in continuing his career and is preparing to meet Canada’s Brad Gushue here Friday with a chance to finish first in the round robin of the world men’s curling championship.
Winning a gold medal at worlds wasn’t the primary goal for the season, but Edin at least hopes to give himself a chance to salvage a third world championship.
Every day since that gold medal game at the Olympics, Edin has thought about the sixth end that turned it around and, of course, giving up a five-ender later to seal the deal.
How much has he been kicking himself since then?
“A lot,” he said. “That loss will definitely stick forever. It was a one-time opportunity. Even if we get back and play in another Olympic final, even if we win one, this loss will hurt. It will always be one we should have won.”
“We almost felt like that at the previous Olympics when we were 8-1 after the round robin and having a good record against the Canadian team, Brad Jacobs, and lost a semifinal that we shouldn’t have lost either,” he added.
“Even our first of three Olympics we lost the bronzemedal game. All three of them were kind of one step down from where we should have been.”
Edin said if he was going to retire, it would have been four years earlier after the bronze in Sochi, not now.
And he said if he’d managed to beat Shuster and win that gold he wouldn’t have chosen to retire on top.
“No,” Edin said. “If we’d won gold, I’d have wanted to win more. That decision was after the last Olympics. That was the big one because I had a lot of injuries and I felt we had done what we could with that old team. That decision was should I quit and get an education or put together a new team and really go all in for as long as it was fun and as long as we could compete against the best teams out there.”
Edin has had six surgeries in the past seven years.
“Three in my back, two in my left knee and one in my left shoulder,” the 32-year-old said.
“I have two more surgeries lined up for May, another back surgery and my shoulder. They’re not from curling though. I’m going to look into that now and see if there might be something bigger undermining my body.”
The funding situation puts him in the same boat as the majority of elite teams in Canada, having to secure sponsorship money to cover costs of travel, food, hotels and entry fees so that they can put themselves in position to use their prize money to pay themselves some sort of salary.
Edin was Sweden’s flagbearer at the Pyeongchang Olympics, has won an Olympic bronze and silver medal, and two world championships. Last year, he became the first European to win a men’s Slam event, made it two in a row, then finished up with a third and the season title. He’s a household name in two countries.
Despite his success, he’s not exempt. All Swedish athletes have been informed there will be no money for any of them for travel expenses at least for the next year.
For a dozen years, Edin’s teams have received between $150,000-$200,000 of travel-related funding to compete against the top teams in events like the Pinty’s Slam Series in Canada. He has spent half those years on the road and most of that time in Canada.
Unlike the Brier, there is no prize money at the world championship.
Attracting a big money sponsor would be enhanced if he matched his coach Peje Lindberg by winning his third world championship here.