British curlers stay ice cool in Beijing’s old Water Cube

FOURTEEN years after Michael Phelps splashed his way into Olympic history, the famous ‘Water Cube’ turned to ice as British curlers Bruce Mouat and Jennifer Dodds started the Beijing Winter Olympics by surging to a winning start of their own.

Mouat and Dodds, the reigning mixed curling world champions, secured an encouraging 9-5 opening victory over world bronze medallists Sweden in the first phase of the 10-team roundrobin competition.

A three-point steal on the Swedish power-play in the penultimate end effectively sealed victory for the Scots, although they had to rely on an uncharacteristic miss by Sweden’s Almida De Vall with her final stone to evade being taken to an extra end.

“We will be trying to improve on that but it is a great start,” said Mouat. “We have never actually played that team before. We know they will be at the top end of their table at the end of the week so are really chuffed with how we played.

“To be in the same arena as all those amazing athletes before like Phelps and (Rebecca) Adlington means a lot to us, and hopefully we can keep it going.”

The atmosphere in the inevitably re-named ‘Ice Cube’ was helped by the addition of around 200 Chinese spectators, all of whom had undergone a period of quarantine in order to enter the ‘closed loop’ system and enter the venue’s stands.

If it hardly saw a repeat of the kind of frenzy that greeted Phelps’ eight-medal success at the summer Games in 2008, it still marked a notable moment both in these unprecedented Beijing

Games and the respective careers of these Olympic debutants.

It was an encouraging display fashioned by the hand of Dodds, who played a neat angle promotion – a kind of plant – to establish a three-point lead in the third, before her inch-perfect guard in the seventh led to the Swedes gifting the match-winning advantage.

Dodds said she is looking forward to meeting up with her women’s team-mates, including skip Eve Muirhead, who were yet to arrive in Beijing at the time Dodds and Mouat were fashioning their positive start.

“It is nice to be the first athletes from GB to compete – that is a real honour,” said Dodds. “The rest of our team are probably somewhere in the air, and it will be good to catch up again and pass back some information.” They play a double-header against Canada and Switzerland today.