Swiss Capture Bubble Worlds Amid Crazy Curling Week

Switzerland has won their sixth world women’s curling title in last nine attempts.

Dynasty.

It was the second in a row for the team of Silvana Tirinzoni, Alina Paetz, Esther Neuenschwander and Melanie Barbezat and while the championship linescore was tight—4-2—their RCF opponents never really threatened the defending champions.

A missed draw for two RCF points in the third end proved painful, as the Swiss followed with the only deuce of the match in the fourth.

Switzerland finished 14-1, the class of the inflated 14-team field, while RCF wound up 12-3.

RCF, skipped by Alina Kovaleva, should be appointed by her association (also RCF) to compete at Beijing 2022, although stranger things have happened. Kovaleva’s domestic rival—former national team skip Anna Sidorova—has been unable to mount a serious challenge to Kovaleva in recent years.

However, this latest version of Team Kovaleva included third Julia Portunova, who originally hails from Sidorova’s team. Interesting stuff.

The Unites States proved a pleasant surprise, as Tabitha Peterson’s foursome—with former skip Nina Roth at third, Rebecca Hamilton at second and Tara Peterson at lead—defeated Sweden 9-5 for bronze. It marked USA’s first medal in world championship play since 2006, and was the cause for much on-ice celebration.

What now for Sweden’s Anna Hasselborg?

Her defending Olympic champions are leaking oil heading into the 2021-22 Olympic season. After playing only a small handful of challenge matches in-country due to the pandemic—a scenario many teams faced this year—the squad failed to win a game at their first Grand Slam tournament. They rebounded to post a semifinal result at the second Slam and looked decent through the world round robin, going 10-3 and defeating Canada in the quarterfinals, but lost two straight playoff games.

It will be interesting to see what Canadian coach Wayne Middaugh plans for the next eight months.

What an interesting world championship it was for Denmark. Madeleine Dupont’s team was all over the map early on, crushing China 14-5 but losing 13-4 to Switzerland, as they lurched to an early 1-4 won/loss record. The team then went on a four-game win streak and added a three-match streak to finish at 8-5 before bowing 8-7 to the U.S. in the quarterfinals.

Their wild week gives Denmark the fourth of six Olympic berths in Beijing.

Canada grabbed the sixth and final Olympic berth after a horror 1-5 start to their week, with Kerri Einarson’s foursome finishing the round robin at 7-6 and having to face Sweden in the quarterfinals. Their exit matched that of Brendan Bottcher’s in the world men’s competition and for the first time ever, Canada failed to score a medal at one of the annual four-player world championships.

The result mirrors Canada’s four-player podium miss at the PyeongChang 2018 Olympic Winter Games.

Another team that heads back to the drawing board is Scotland, skipped by Eve Muirhead. They won their first three matches, lost two, won two, lost two, and finished with three straight losses for a 6-7 record.

Where the training “bubble” the Scots crafted in Stirling seemed to pay dividends for Bruce Mouat’s men’s squad, it didn’t quite work out on the women’s side.

Korea’s Kim Eun-jung finished a game better at 7-6 after falling to a 0-4 record early on, but their story would be one of triumph regardless of the result. To get back on the world stage after such an ordeal was an accomplishment in itself, and with Kim Yeong-mi now in the alternate position, this is a new team dynamic to figure out.

Both China (skipped by Han Yu) and Germany (Daniela Jentsch) finished 6-7 and, as you might expect, it’s the Germans who can feel their confidence grow given how they battled, shorthanded, throughout the week.

The outpouring of support didn’t hurt either.

The biggest match for Japan’s Sayaka Yoshimura didn’t even occur at the worlds. Rather, it came in the final of the Japanese championship back in February. A loss to rival Satsuki Fujisawa would have meant no Olympic trials competition to decide next February’s Japanese representative; the 2018 Olympic bronze winners would have earned the 2022 berth outright.

In Calgary, Team Yoshimura struggled to a 5-8 record with three consecutive losses—concluding a five-game losing streak—coming in extra ends.

The Japanese fans, however, were typically brilliant.

Finishing the standings were Anna Kubeskova’s Czech Republic at 3-10, Italy’s Stefania Constantini at 2-11 and Estonia’s Marie Turmann, who defeated Germany 11-9 in a wild extra-end affair to score her nation’s first victory in their first world championship appearance.

Of these three squads, the Czechs scored all the attention due to a late round robin protest, and a disappointing pause in broadcast coverage—due to positive COVID-19 crew tests—meant Canadian curling fans missed seeing Turmann, who is curling’s second Elsa, in the spotlight.

As curling fans and stakeholders start to recover from a three-month, seven-championship bubble rockfest, event planners are putting the finishing touches on the final curling event of this pandemic curling season—the world mixed doubles affair in Aberdeen, Scotland.