Canadians curl past five-ring frustration
Koe and Homan rinks intend to put Olympic disappointment behind them
Eight months later, Kevin Koe hasn’t even come close to letting the sting of failing to medal at the Olympics go away and hide.
“I don’t know that I’ll ever get over that,” Koe says.
“You had a chance to get to the Olympics and win a medal and you didn’t. Will you ever totally get over that? I doubt it.”
Koe and his Canadian teammates Marc Kennedy, Brent Laing and Ben Hebert lost back-to-back games in the medal round at the Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, and wound up in the dreaded fourth place.
There was tremendous disappointment from the curlers and from a country that expected a medal, a country that had always had one delivered in curling competition at the Olympics.
You can’t just flush something like that.
“It was unfortunate for us, just timing,” Koe said. “We played two bad games in a row and they were obviously at the worst time. I’ve come to accept that can happen, but will I ever get over it totally? Probably never, but it’s not going to hold me back going forward.”
Koe is back with a new team this season — Kennedy is taking time off from the game and Laing is curling with John Epping — and he’s back to his usual tricks. His new team, which includes third B.J. Neufeld and second Colton Flasch, won the inaugural World Cup event in China last month and qualified for the playoffs at the Grand Slam’s Elite 10 last weekend in Chatham-Kent, Ont.
“You know, I’ve moved on,” Koe says. “I’ve learned, after playing this game for so long, that if you’re gonna play at the top level against the good teams and you’re gonna be successful, you’re obviously gonna have some great wins, but you’re probably gonna have some tough losses along the way.”
Members of Rachel Homan’s team are trying to take a similar approach to managing their Olympic hangover.
The Homan foursome had an even worse time than Koe at the Olympics, failing to make the playoffs with a 4-5 record.
Homan also won a gold medal at the recent World Cup and made it to the final four at the Elite 10 last weekend. Her team’s philosophy is you can choose to let the failure at the Olympics weigh you down or you can simply shed the baggage.
“I think it’s a decision as much as anything,” said Emma Miskew, Homan’s third. “It’s not an easy time to move on from that.
“But we all made the decision that we were going to and it became a lot easier when all four of us decided collectively, ‘It’s over and there’s nothing we can do about it, so let’s move forward and really try to improve.’
“We’ve learned from this and if we ever are lucky enough to get the opportunity to do this again, we know what we’d do differently to be sharper. Part of what helped our result at the World Cup was completely letting go of what happened at the Olympics.”
The Homan team, which also includes second Joanne Courtney and lead Lisa Weagle, is still intact from last season, though they made a decision to change coaches after the Olympics.
Last season their coach was Adam Kingsbury, a mental performance specialist, who left the on-ice decisions and technical matters to the players while working to keep their heads in good spaces.
This year they have enlisted Marcel Rocque, a man who won three world championships with the Randy Ferbey rink and is widely respected as a curling coach. He has been coaching Chinese teams in the Olympics since 2014.
Miskew believes her team needed someone like Rocque to get them back on track after the disappointment of Pyeongchang.
“He’s great,” she says. “We worked with him in the past. He pushes us and he’s extremely smart.
“When Adam was coaching for us, it was what we needed at the time. We needed a mental training coach out there and we got a lot out of him. Going forward we thought we really would benefit from having a curling coach for this season just to get ourselves back up there. There’s no better, so we asked him and we’re really happy that he’s on board.”
With that addition and a lot less pressure this season, Miskew sees this as an opportunity to put Pyeongchang in the past.
“It’s almost a renewed energy on the team because we were unsuccessful at the Olympics, as weird as that is,” she said. “We feel motivated, we feel driven and we want to get back up there.” Notes: At the Grand Slam Princess Auto Elite 10 event in Chatham-Kent, Brad Gushue won the men’s final, while Sweden’s Anna Hasselborg took home the women’s title.