Curling golds overshadowed by hockey mania
Amazing performances at Sochi deserved much better coverage
With perfect hindsight, Postmedia’s national columnists revisit moments and events they observed in 2014 that deserve a second look. Today, Canada’s curling teams. No year of sports writing ever ends without regrets, and topping my 2014 list — even ahead of being elsewhere when GM Mike Gillis and coach John Tortorella were jettisoned by the Vancouver Canucks, and Jim Benning and Willie Desjardins were hired to replace them — was failing to take the road less travelled last February.
Canadian curlers got the short end of it at the Sochi Olympics, partly due to scheduling, partly to the irresistible pull of hockey.
After spending a week in Winnipeg in December of 2013 covering the Roar of the Rings, the Olympic curling trials, one of my most enjoyable weeks of writing sports in at least a decade, I was looking forward to curling getting a sizable chunk of my attention in Russia.
But inevitably, even after swearing this time it was going to be different ... well, it wasn’t.
Hockey took over, as it always does.
Curling may be as Canadian as maple syrup and Tim Hortons, but Olympic hockey is all of that plus an obsessive mass appeal to which curling, for all its excellent TV ratings and drama and engaging personalities, can only dream of comparing.
So Jennifer Jones and her Winnipeg team rolled, unprecedented and undefeated, through their competition, but had the misfortune to have their gold-medal victory over Sweden upstaged by Marie-Philip Poulin and the Canadian women’s hockey team, who late that night rallied to engineer a storybook comeback and stun the United States 3-2 in overtime for the gold.
A day later, Brad Jacobs’ Sault Ste. Marie rink beat two-time world champion David Murdoch of Scotland to complete the gold-medal curling sweep for Canada, but was relegated to second banana by Jamie Benn’s goal, Carey Price’s shutout and a nail-biting 1-0 win over Team USA in the men’s hockey semifinal.
By the closing days of the Olympics — even though not a single member of Mike Babcock’s team would trade a Stanley Cup for a gold medal — hockey dwarfs all else for Canadians when its teams are in the hunt for gold.
Throw in the fact that in each instance of curling getting buried, the hockey opposition was the U.S., which has become a much more serious rival for Canada (and always was, for the women) than Russia, and the ice bowlers had no chance at a fair share of the headlines back home.
So to Jennifer Jones, Kaitlyn Lawes, Jill Officer and Dawn Askin ... and to Brad Jacobs, Ryan Fry, E.J. and Ryan Harnden: sorry, guys. There’ll never be another first gold medal.
You played better than we wrote.
I’d like to say we’ll make it up to you one day but ... Postmedia News