Madison curlers are no strangers
PYEONGCHANG, South Korea – One advantage of curling with your sibling is there’s no beating around the bush, no sugarcoating when it comes to communicating on the ice or calling out mistakes.
“We’re both a little less timid around each other,” Matt Hamilton said last fall of curling with his sister Becca. “If she misses a shot or if I miss a shot, we can be very blunt on why you did it because I’ve known you forever.
“Where I feel like some of these teams that are newish, they kind of have that honeymoon phase where they don’t want to yell at their partner or criticize or anything, walking on eggshells. Where we’re way past (that), I’m not going to sugarcoat anything for her.”
Becca Hamilton, who’s the younger sibling by 17 months, agrees being direct is something that helps them both. “We are kind of short with each other at times. And like Matt was saying, brutally honest,” she said Tuesday during a news conference. “So I guess in the long run though it helps us achieve what we need to.”
The Hamilton siblings from the Madison (Wis.) Curling Club will compete in the debut of mixed doubles at the Winter Games. They open with their first game Thursday against a team of Olympic Athletes from Russia. Both Becca and Matt have also qualified with their teams for the men’s and women’s events. The United States joins Canada and Switzerland as the only countries to qualify teams in all three events.
Their first opponents in the mixed doubles round robin, Anastasia Bryzgalova and Aleksandr Krushelnitckii, are married. What’s the stronger bond for a team — being siblings or a married couple?
“Definitely the sibling bond; I can’t divorce my sister,” Matt Hamilton quipped.
“I’ve known him longer,” Becca Hamilton responded.
Matt, 28, got into curling as a teen “basically to pass the time in the winter,” he said. His coach recruited Becca, 27, who remembers being forced to watch Matt compete in a championship final at the curling club.
While chemistry is one of the team’s strengths, Becca also gives the team an advantage in sweeping, says Jake Higgs, USA Curling’s high performance director for mixed doubles.
“Becca is a super powerful female sweeper, probably I would say the best in the women’s field here in mixed doubles,” Higgs said. “That’s a huge asset for our team. Where with a lot of mixed doubles teams, the man will throw his rock, then kind of chase it and sweep it himself. But with our team we don’t have to do that. Becca sweeps Matt’s and Matt sweeps Becca’s.”
Higgs calls mixed doubles the “hip fast-paced cousin” to men’s and women’s curling at the Olympics.
“With mixed doubles, it’s all out aggression every end,” Higgs said. “Every end there’s going to be rocks in play. I think it’s really going to be a great event for TV, especially in a country like the United States where the sport is growing so rapidly. I think this will send it off the charts.”