The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Eve quietly confident as she prepares to regain world title
Perthshire skip determined to end four-year wait for another gold medal
Four years hardly qualifies as a barren spell when you’re talking about the very pinnacle of your sport.
But Eve Muirhead has had to do without a gold medal for the longest period of her career. There have been plenty of silver and bronzes since the Perthshire curler and her young team became World Champions in 2013.
But, Muirhead, as driven and focused an elite athlete as any you will find in Scotland, will be trying to win her way back to the top of the world in China over the next eight days.
She said: “We won the Worlds four years ago. In the Europeans there have been second and third places. The gold has been on hold for a while, though.
“But we’re probably in the best position as a team that we’ve ever been.
“Looking back at when we won the Worlds and then got a medal at the Olympics it was a brave move to make changes.
“You can keep plodding along but other teams improve and change things and the time was right to do that with us.
“We made other important changes at the start of the year (a new coaching set up and a new team member).
That was always going to bring us down a bit before we came back up and I’d like to think we’ve come out of that little bit of a rut. Now, after a couple of good tournaments, we’re definitely on the up.”
One of those tournaments was the Scottish Championships in Perth, which you have to win to qualify for the Worlds.
It was Muirhead’s seventh national title
so you would think the stress and pressure will get easier to live with. You’d be wrong.
“It gets harder and harder to win,” she said.
“Each year there are so many nerves and so much pressure. It’s a horrible week. It really is. It’s my least favourite of them all because we have such a massive target on our backs and there’s so much riding on it. You’re just glad when it gets to the Monday morning after.
“When I won for the first time in 2009 and beat Kelly Wood in the final that basically earned me the skipping position for the Vancouver Olympics. That’s when I realised how important the Scottish was. It changes careers.
“That’s sport, though. You have to be able to deal with championships that play with your mind. The Worlds will have a different type of feel.
“It’s a very, very hard event, especially when you look at the field this year. I don’t think it could be any tougher.
“We’re not the only targeted team, though. There are five or six. So the focus is taken off you a bit.”
Canada are still the powerhouse of curling but the landscape is changing. There are now over 50 World Curling Federation member associations, some of whom are investing heavily in the elite end of the sport.
Muirhead believes curlers from the part of the world she is currently competing in are making the strongest push to shake up the established order.
She explained: “You have to look at Japan, China and Korea – Asian countries that when I started curling didn’t even exist in the sport. They’re getting stronger and stronger.
“Within a few years Betty Wang, the Chinese skip, was world champion and an Olympic bronze medallist. That’s just the way the sport is going.
“These countries throw money at it to hire the best coaches. They go and live in Canada, they play all the best tournaments and that’s what they do. We’ve got to make sure we keep up.
“A few years ago the Koreans weren’t really on the map. Now, I don’t think we’ve beaten them this season. We’ve played them about four times and they’re like our bogey team.
“It is an exciting time to be involved in the sport. The amount of countries that are adopting curling is really, really good. A few years ago when I played the European Mixed Championships out in Turkey, I didn’t even know the European C Championships existed – that was another 15 teams.
“You’ve also got the European Bs, which is 15. The European As is 10. So there are a lot of countries where people don’t think there’s curling. All that’s going to happen is they will get better.
“The part of the game we maybe out-smart them is the tactical game. You can be robotic and text book when it comes to the basics, but when it comes to the knowledge of the sport and the tactical side you can sometimes get on top of them there.”