It’s hard to believe it’s nearing 14 years since Brad Gushue skipped Canada to a gold medal at the 2006 Winter Olympic Games in Torino, Italy.
And ever since then, Gushue has directed much of his focus and a lot of his energy to getting back on the Olympic ice.
In the interim, he and his teammates from St. John’s have won two Brier Canadian men’s championships and a world men’s title, and have had much success on the World Curling Tour and Grand Slam circuit, but Gushue hasn’t been able to grab those Olympic rings again.
In Canada, becoming an Olympic curler is a real process. A very tough process.
For example, even though he was the defending Olympic champion, Gushue didn’t even make it to the 2009 Trials that decided Canada’s rinks for the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver; he was bounced in the pre-Trials qualifying event.
Gushue didn’t get to the 2013 Trials either after losing one of the qualifying finals at the pre-Trials. And the disappointment must have been rubbed in by the fact that he lost that game to Brad Jacobs, who would go on to win the Trials and, then, the 2014 Olympic title in Sochi, Russia.
Gushue did get to the 2017 Trials as the Brier champ from earlier that same year, and gave it a good run, only to lose to Mike McEwen in a semifinal. Kevin Koe would eventually take the Trials to wear Canadian colours in PyeongChang, South Korea, where he finished fourth.
Koe’s rink, by the way, had been the first to earn a berth in those 2017 Trials, having won the 2015 Canada Cup. By in doing so, Koe and Co. avoided the pressure of qualifying over the ensuing two years.
The same pressure-reliever is up for grabs this week in Leduc, Alta., where Gushue, Koe and Jacobs skip three of the seven men’s entries in the 2019 Home Hardware Canada Cup. This and next year’s Canada Cup winners will earn spots at the 2021 Tim Hortons Roar of the Rings Trials in Saskatoon, where this country’s Olympic rinks for the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing will be decided.
The 2020 and 2021 Brier men and Scotties Canadian women’s champions will also make it to Saskatoon, as will three men’s and women’s teams which have amassed the most points on the Canadian Team Ranking System (CTRS) in the 2019-21 time period, but haven’t already qualified.
The last two berths in the nine-team Trials will be filled by rinks coming out of the last-chance pre-Trials event.
But Gushue, Mark Nichols, Brett Gallant and Geoff Walker won’t need to worry too much about CTRS points standings or possibly having to set aside the last week of October in 2021 for the pre-Trials if they can come away with a win this week in Leduc, where they open their six-game preliminary schedule with games today against Edmonton’s Brendan Bottcher and the up-and-coming Matt Dunstone, who curls out of Regina.
The Gushue rink has had a pretty decent first couple of months in the 2019-20 curling season, with runner-up finishes in both Grand Slam events to date — the Masters and the Tour Challenge — and making it to the semifinals at the Stu Sells Tankard in Toronto and quarter-finals at the Shorty Jenkins Classic in Cornwall, Ont.
The St. John’s entry is seventh in the WCT men’s world standings and third on the recently reset CTRS list, behind Jacobs and John Epping, who is also in Leduc with his Toronto rink, as is one skipped by former Canadian and world men’s champion Glenn Howard.
The seven teams in the women’s Canada Cup field are those led by Jennifer Jones, Chelsea Carey, Rachel Homan, Kerri Einarson, Robyn Silvernagel, Tracy Fleury and Cheryl Bernard, although Bernard is skipping in place of Casey Scheidegger, who is due to give birth any day now.
All seven women’s teams are from Ottawa and west, as are Gushue’s six opponents on the men’s side. That means Gushue, Nichols, Gallant and Walker can be seen as representing the five eastern provinces in Leduc.
But make no mistake, the ultimate goal is for them to represent the whole country in Beijing two-and-a-half years from now.
Yes, there a lot of money at stake this week— $110,000 purses for both the men and women, with $40,000 going to the eventual winners and $25,000 to the runners-up.
The victors also get spots in the Continental Cup in London, Ont., in early January, and for Gushue, a win this week would be a particularly nice springboard into the next Grand Slam event, the Boost National, which is in effect a hometown competition, since it’s being played in Conception Bay South Dec. 10-15.
But those would be the short-term benefits. Their longer view is trained on China.
Twitter: @telybrendan
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