Curling Tour Talk: The Ice Is In

The icemaking is well underway at the Ice Cube in Beijing, with the house paint colours revealed as traditional blue and red.

At PyeongChang 2018, the blue was replaced with teal. At Vancouver 2010, green made an appearance, paired with blue.

The stone handle colours are expected to be the usual red and yellow. It’s believed that other colours would make it difficult for the visually impaired to follow the action.

Now that you’ve received this essential information, what else is going on in the world of curling? Besides that big quadrennial tournament that is just two weeks away, of course …

CZECHED OUT

The World Qualifying Event is ongoing in Lohja, Finland for the final spots into the as-yet-still-going world championships in Price George, CAN (women) and Las Vegas, USA (men). It’s a COVID-secure bubble with no spectators, following the World Curling Federation’s cancellation of the World Junior-B Championships earlier this month.

During the entry testing, three COVID-19 positive cases were detected. Two came from the Czech Republic women’s team, plus another individual.

The Czech Republic delegation, with the exception of one individual, travelled together and were deemed to be close contacts.

Following guidance from the local Finnish health authority, all positive cases and close contacts are undergoing a required quarantine period in Lohja before being cleared to return home.

As the positive results were confirmed ahead of the event’s Team Meeting, the Czechs were given the opportunity to alter their entry lineups to enable them to compete in this event.

However, rather than send a replacement team, the Czech Curling Association elected to withdraw from the competition. As a result, the Czechs were given the designations DNS (Did Not Start) which will automatically rank them as finishing last in women’s standings of the event.

At the 2021 world championship in Calgary, the Czechs—skipped by veteran Anna Kubeskova—launched a protest when event broadcast crew members tested positive, forcing modifications to the match schedule. The Czechs became the only team assigned a three-game day, which they declared to be unfair.

At the previous men’s worlds also held at the bubble venue in Calgary, the Swiss men’s team skipped by Peter de Cruz were forced to play three playoff games in one day, after false positive COVID-19 test results wiped out the final Saturday of competition.

On the ice in Lohja, all eyes are on Denmark’s Madeleine Dupont. The Danish skip surprised with a strong world championship in Calgary which qualified her for the Olympics, and followed that up with a World Curling Tour event victory in Switzerland in the fall. Since then, however, she’s been hobbled by a slipped disc and is in a fight to not only qualify Denmark for the worlds, but to be healthy for Beijing.

CANADA GALS

Don’t look now, but …

Indeed. Curling Canada has modified the draw for its 2022 national women’s championship to repeat the 2021 BubbleSTOH (but with a few huge changes, read on) with three Wild Card teams taking part.

Tracy Fleury is back, as expected. The finalists at the Canadian Olympic Trials appeared haunted by their near-victory when they competed at the Manitoba STOH provincial, and weren’t a factor in the playoffs.

Chelsea Carey makes it in, after losing the Saskatchewan STOH final to Penny Barker.

Finally, Team Homan made it in to the Scotties shootout after all—minus the skipper, of course. Emma Miskew moves up to skip and recently named alternate Ali Flaxey is into the starting lineup, along with Joanne Courtney and Sarah Wilkes.

The STOH draw was just released, and it looks interesting. The debate will be heavy, particularly if it’s kept around for the men’s championship, aka the Brier.

The Championship Pool is gone, meaning we go from 18 teams, then to six, to the final four. The two pool winners wait for pool finishers #2 and #3 to battle, and the eventual winners go to the page 1 versus 2 game while the losers drop to the Page 3 versus 4 matchup.

Are the pools weighted correctly? Pool A has all three Wild Card teams plus Saskatchewan, Northern Ontario (Krista McCarville), New Brunswick (Andrew Crawford), P.E.I. (Suzanne Birt), Newfoundland (Sarah Hill) and Nunavut (Brigitte MacPhail).

Pool B has Alberta (Laura Walker), Canada (Kerri Einarson), Manitoba (Mackenzie Zacharias), Ontario (Hollie Duncan), NWT (Kerry Galusha), Nova Scotia (Christina Black), B.C. (Mary-Anne Arsenault), Quebec (Laurie Ste-Georges) and Yukon (Hailey Birney).

One thing is certain … if this draw were used at the 2021 Bubble Brier, Wayne Middaugh would have been in the playoffs. He won his 2021 Brier pool but was then eliminated when he crossed over (in the Championship Pool). This time around, it seems that winning your pool means a heck of a lot.

HOST SITES

Event host site announcements aren’t exciting for your average curling fan.

Saskatchewan’s recent move—shipping its upcoming men’s Tankard from Saskatoon to the small town of Whitewood—has made some waves, if only because of The Big P (pandemic). CurlSask’s thinking is that there’s less chance of a COVID-19 outbreak in a smaller, more rural setting (Whitewood’s 2016 population was just over 800) as compared to a larger city centre.

The 2023 women’s world championship is headed to Sandviken in Sweden. That’s about 190 kilometres north of Stockholm, and they’ve got a 10,000-seat arena there, which opened in 2009.

More intriguing is news that a city called Perm, in Russia, will host the 2022 European Championships in November. The region is at the foot of the Ural mountains and, well, that’s got to be the most eastern location in ECC event history.

The only other Europeans to be hosted in Russia came in 2011, at Moscow.

The WCF hasn’t been able to accept any event hosting applications from Russia for the past two years. Under the terms of the range of punishments imposed on the country by the World Anti-Doping Agency and partially upheld by the Court of Arbitration for Sport—for the Sochi 2014 doping scandal and various cover-ups since—the country was banned from hosting major events.

The ruling tells Federations to strip Russia of major events due to be held in the nation until December 2022 “unless it is legally or practically impossible to do so.”

Technically speaking, this year’s Euros—which are slated to run from November 19 to 26—will operate before the WADA sanction period is over. But there’s little danger of the WCF getting its wrists slapped. First of all, the European championships are not a world championship. Moreover, other sports have been permitted to host events in Russia this calendar year—some were even hosted last year, in 2021.