Toughest opponents yet to come for Koe rink
As mysterious as the Russian team at the world men’s curling championship may be, there were no scary surprises for front-running Canada.
Kevin Koe’s Calgary foursome improved its record to 7-0 on Tuesday with a 6-3 win over Alexander Baumann of Germany and a 7-2 victory over Alexey Tselousov of Russia.
The Canadian foursome of Koe, Marc Kennedy, Brent Laing and Ben Hebert have yet to clinch a playoff spot and have their toughest opponents still to come.
Canada will take on defending world champion Niklas Edin of Sweden (43) Wednesday afternoon (8 a.m. ET) after facing 1-6 South Korea in the morning game (3 a.m. ET).
Koe and Co. then wrap up the round robin against Norway’s Thomas Ulsrud, who is in second place at 6-1, and Switzerland’s Sven Michel (3-4) on Thursday.
“We’re not looking anywhere past our next game,” Laing told Curling Canada’s Al Cameron. “We played another really good game (Tuesday night) on tough ice conditions with a lot of frost. Draw weight was tough. Luckily I didn’t have to throw one because it didn’t look like fun. But we have back-to-back games on Wednesday and that’s always a tough grind, so that’s where our focus is.”
The Russian game featured one of the more intriguing teams of the world championship this year. The foursome skipped by Tselousov arrived unannounced a day before the event began to represent Russia, even though Andrey Stukalskiy’s more experienced team was supposed to do so.
There was little explanation for why Stukalskiy’s entire team was sent home. A vague suggestion was made that they were all ill, though there are other suspicions and rumours swirling around St. Jakobshalle in Basel, Switzerland.
“They never did say why, what the illness was,” TSN play-by-play man Vic Rauter said on Tuesday’s broadcast. “They just set tongues a-wagging, all kinds of speculation, rumour. The entire team was sent home and they had to put this team together and bring them in. It immediately had people thinking about, were they in fact taking something? Were there maybe performance enhancing drugs? Although there was nothing ever to suggest it and they’ve never answered the question.”
Either way, the Russian team that is here is now 2-5 after the loss to Canada.