Most popular curling colours this season

Black and Blue is a fine album by the Rolling Stones.

Black and blue is also how folks at Canada’s TSN might be feeling these days, following last week’s furor.

CBC and Sportsnet are the usual targets of Canadian curling fan rage (in the United States, it’s NBC and ESPN).

Now TSN knows what the other guys have been going through, generally speaking, for decades.

The World Curling Federation might be nursing wounds this week, following Brad Gushue’s outburst at the Pan Continental Championships.

Both incidents made big news headlines.

But the curling stones continues to turn, of course, and there’s a few things to catch up on as the second Grand Slam of the season is underway.

Black and blue, by the way, seems to be a popular colour choice with today’s curling team kits.

They are, to put it mildly, everywhere.

Above are recent glimpses of teams Jones, Carruthers, Inglis, Edin and Schwaller. They’ve all been wearing these colours for a while now.

(To be fair to the Swiss, they recently unveiled a new burgundy kit.)

Team Wrana, being Swedish, also wear the blue and black—as do their rivals skipped by Anna Hasselborg.

Wrana will represent Sweden for the first time at this month’s European Championships, having finally bested Hasselborg in a qualifying series last month.

Hasselborg just walloped Wrana 9-3 at The National Slam in Pictou, N.S. to climb to 3-0. Wrana is at 2-1.

It’s been a decent season thus far for Jennifer Jones, who made noise last season with a Scotties silver and a first-time win at the Canadian mixed doubles shootout.

Last month in Niagara Falls, Jones won her first Slam crown since 2017; a banner year in which she won three Slam titles.

Last weekend, Chelsea Carey spared at skip stone and the Jones crew made it to the final of the StuSells 1924 Halifax Classic, losing to Switzerland’s Silvana Tirinzoni.

Team Jones is 3-0 heading into a National match against Tirinzoni; that will be the featured TV game on Friday (Sportsnet).

Some black and blue teams have adjusted their blue tone, which helps differentiate them from the crowd. A little.

The young Ha team from South Korea is one example…

… while Japan’s Team Yanagisawa, bronze winners at last week’s Pan Continental shootout in Kelowna, is another.

Here’s Yanigasawa’s young second, and I mean young second, Takeru Yamamoto, in Niagara Falls Slam action.

He was the one on the stone when the sweep cheating allegation burst on the scene in September, whereupon he and his teammates were soon vindicated.

Then there’s the Kevin Koe crew. Gone are the plain white-ish tones of 2022-23, and now the splashes of teal are sharp enough to fool the eye into thinking this ain’t black and blue.

Although it is.

Those lads are currently 1-1 in Pictou and tangle with Schwaller tonight. To no one’s surprise, Bottcher versus Gushue is the featured TV match.

You can’t really blame the Americans. Those in the national program have been wearing blue and black for a while now—they’re the ones, it seems, now joined by a gaggle of imitators.

At least the Shuster team chooses to drop the black pants once in a while, and go with grey or even off-white.

I don’t think we can expect that from teams in the women’s program, right?

It just goes on and on and on. Even one youthful Scottish team has joined the colourfray.

Rebecca Morrison’s gang is performing well this season, nothing at all like the squad that went 3-9 at last year’s world championship. 

They’ve been touring since August and hold a 24-13 won/loss record—more importantly, they’ve qualified for the playoffs at five out of six tournaments, and scored two runner-up finishes.

Morrison—who has Jennifer Dodds remaining from Eve Muirhead’s 2022 Olympic champions—was just selected to represent Scotland at the Euros, which will be played at Curl Aberdeen.

And what’s this…? Team Yukon, who are into the seeding pool at the Canadian Mixed, are showing off something far less purple and more … wait for it … black and blue?

But the northern lights as a part of the uni? No complaints here, that’s simply fantastic.

Incidentally, the mixed is heading to the playoffs with the semis and medal games scheduled for Nov. 11. Curling Canada wants folks to know you can pay to view the games—all games—on their Curling Canada Plus (+) platform … which they definitely need to do a better job of promoting, in my opinion.

Mixed doubles players have caught the blue/black bug, too.

Estonia’s Maria Kaldvee and Harri Lill are 16-5 after three tournaments and have won two of them—the World Curling Tour stop in their capital, Tallinn, as well as the second Mixed Doubles Super Series event of the season hosted in Chilliwack, B.C.

Their opponents in the Chilliwack final?

None other than Kelowna’s father-daughter combination, Jim and Jaelyn Cotter.

The Cotters have been competing in “mixed dubs” for a while now. Their first event was the B.C. mixed doubles championship in 2016, which they entered so Jaelyn could get some practice in for the upcoming Canada Winter Games. They won the title.

They have a team Instagram account called cottersquared. 

They are adorbs.

And yes ... they too are wearing black and blue.

Jaelyn is just 23 and if she’s anything like her old man, she must also be one of the nicest people you’d ever meet in the sport of curling.

Proud papa turned 49 on the day of the Chilliwack final. He then got to wear Canadian colours on home ice in Kelowna, and taste gold in the process.

Team Brad Gushue, in a shrewd move, picked him up as team alternate for their Pan Continental adventure.

The fourth of seven Mixed Doubles Super Series events goes Nov. 30-Dec. 3 at the Fort Rouge in Winnipeg.

I think I’ll stop now. Those are just some of the black ’n blue teams I know about.

If your squad is also wearing those colours—and you’ve bothered to read this far— send us a pic through our Xitter or Zuckerbook accounts and I’ll add it to this story.