Facts and figures for playoff consideration
Switzerland and Great Britain seem to have a slight advantage heading into Friday’s women’s team curling semifinals at Beijing 2022. Or perhaps not.
Curling, of course, is known as the Roaring Game because of the rumbling sound the 45-pound granite stones make as they traverse the pebble on the ice. That sound also clarifies that the sport is in fact played on an ice surface, and not at a desk with calculators and protractors.
So take this pre-semifinal information dump with as many grains of salt as you wish.
Switzerland’s Silvana Tirinzoni has dominated Satsuki Fujisawa’s Japan over her career, winning 11 times against just two losses. That record is 4-1 in the current quadrennial (2018 to present) and includes a solid 8-4 victory in the last round robin session in Beijing.
The Swiss are on a high having won the round robin (8-1). They are the two-time defending world champions. They seem adaptable and clinical.
Japan, meanwhile, have lurched into the playoffs by winning just one of their last three games. They didn’t know their Draw Shot Challenge (DSC) scores were better than Canada’s, and initially thought they had missed the semifinals after their loss to Switzerland.
On paper, Japan will need a Herculean effort to defeat the Swiss at the Ice Cube.
The other semifinal sees a resumption of the rivalry between Eve Muirhead of Great Britain and Anna Hasselborg of Sweden.
These two first battled at the 2009 World Juniors in Vancouver, site of the 2010 Olympic venue. Muirhead won the round robin matchup 7-1 and went on to win the title over Canada’s Kaitlyn Lawes. One year later, Hasselborg and two of her current team members defeated Canada’s Rachel Homan 8-3 in the final for the world junior crown.
The two skips have been deadlocked throughout their adult women’s careers. They are 19-19, with Hasselborg holding a slight 8-7 edge in games won since 2018. However, Muirhead is competing with a new team this season—the result of a squad system experiment which has delivered incredible results—and they are now 3-0 against their Swedish rivals, with two wins coming at November’s European Championships (8-5 in the round robin and 7-4 in the final) and the other, an 8-2 drubbing, coming earlier this week in Beijing.
This one is simply too close to call.
Great Britain had the rougher round robin, finishing 5-4 compared to Sweden’s 7-2.
Hasselborg is the defending Olympic champion.
Muirhead is competing in her third consecutive Olympic semifinal, having lost in both 2014 (to Canada’s Jennifer Jones) and 2018, where she missed a tricky takeout to defeat Fujisawa’s Japan.
Sweden have Canada’s Wayne Middaugh as coach.
Great Britain counters with two coaches: Sweden’s Kristian Lindstrom, who won world and European titles with Niklas Edin, and the two-time world champion and Olympic silver medalist, David Murdoch.
The women’s semifinals get underway at 20:05 Beijing time, six hours after the start of the men’s bronze medal match between Canada’s Brad Gushue and USA’s John Shuster.