Homan and company stumble out of hack
PYEONGCHANG, SOUTH KOREA— There’s a whole lot of staring in curling. Stand up, squat down, take a paintbrush perspective of the canvas.
A whole of glaring, too, from Canadian skip Rachel Homan on Thursday when asked the obvious question: What the hack?
“I’m at the Olympics,” she said, “so nothing is disappointing.”
Now that’s just not true. And doubtless there’s some leeriness accumulating back home.
The Ottawa rink dug an 0-2 hole on the first day of women’s curling. They are the reigning world champions and were the consensus favourites to retain the title captured by Jennifer Jones et al in Sochi. But they instead became the first Canadian women’s team to start the Olympics tournament with two straight losses, dropping the morning opener 8-6 to South Korea and the evening session 7-6 in an extra end to Sweden.
It was a chess match, which is not necessarily a spectator sport. It makes one pine for the old days of mixed doubles. There was Canadian gold in them thar inaugural hills.
“We made a ton of precision shots,” Homan emphasized after the second loss. “Either they were soft weights or round-backs. Really well played game by both teams and it came down to just a couple of misses here and there.” As they tend to do, in sports. Third Emma Miskew took the long view, pointing out how unrealistic it would have been for anyone to believe the rink could duplicate Jones’ unbeaten run of four years ago.
“Everyone last year at the worlds talked about, ‘Oh you guys went undefeated.’ Oh my God, we could have easily not gone undefeated, we could have easily lost three or four games. We kind of squeaked through a bunch of them.
“We knew this was going to be a tough field. We knew all the teams earned their right to be here.”
It is slightly shocking yet hardly a disaster, stumbling out of the gate. The Canadian women still have sev- en games in the round robin to nail down a playoff berth. But like the lady said, it’s a formidable field and the squad — rounded out by second Joanne Courtney and lead Lisa Weagle — needs to come up grittier in tight games.
The Canadians found themselves immediately behind the eight-ball against Sweden, with Anna Hasselborg stealing two after both Courtney and Miskew fail to execute their shots.
A ripe chance was squandered in the second end when Miskew put her rock in the house to lie three but came up a cropper, drawing a blank.
Canada scored a couple in the third, evening the score on Homan’s last rock. A straight-back run in the fourth led to a force and Sweden nudged ahead again.
It was a grinding match, with the teams trading points back and forth. Hasselborg needed an impressive raise to score one in the ninth, Homan managing to knot it again in the 10th.
By which point, with the home country having dropped their wrangle 7-5 to Japan, just about everybody else departed the rink, noisily spilling out into the night.
The Swedes, with the hammer, drew to the button with the final stone and their opponents could only observe the inevitable unfold.
“We were pretty confident she was going to make that one,” Miskew said.
Maybe confident wasn’t the right word. Maybe resigned was the right word.
“She had just thrown it so it wasn’t like it was a complete guess for her. She’s not going to miss that very often. I was just standing there figuring she’d probably make it and, if we were luck,y maybe not. But she’s a great player. So . . .
“Sometimes all you can do is pray.”