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Great Britain’s men’s team will play for the curling gold night against Canada, after they beat Switzerland 8-5 in an extraordinarily tense semi-final.
The GB quartet, who only scraped through the round-robin stage because the Italians lost to the Swiss earlier in the day, had promised that they would be an entirely different proposition if they got to the knockout rounds and they were as good as their word. The Swiss had won all nine games they had played coming into this semi-final, but were soundly beaten by Bruce Mouat and his team of Grant Hardie, Hammy McMillan and Bobby Lammie.
It was a hell of a game, played in front of a rowdy crowd, the loudest of them a happy band of mad Scottish curling fans who had come along with a repertoire of songs especially for the four men on the team, which they used to drown out the insistent shouts of “Hopp! Schwitz!” from all the Swiss who had crowded into the arena.
It turned on a brilliant shot by Mouat in the seventh end, the curlers call it a “promotion takeout”, but the rest of us might understand it better as feat of improbable geometry in which he managed to hit one of the opposition’s stones into a second, and send that second on again into a third in so that the Swiss, who had been expecting to reap at least three points and move into a 7-4 lead, suddenly found they needed to make a draw just to score one. Then Britain were able to score two in the next end, which meant they led 6-5 going into the 10th after the Swiss chose to blank in the ninth.
Mouat and the Swiss skip Yannick Schwaller have a rivalry that runs right back to their matches in the World Junior Championships a decade ago. Schwaller won the first games they played, but Mouat has had much the better of it in the years since, with a series of famous wins at such monumental events as the Le Gruyère AOP European Championships and the Baden Masters. His rink leads Schwaller’s 22-10 in their head to head, including their last four games straight. Last April they beat them 5-4 in the world championship final.
It was around that time, though, that the Swiss brought in the legendary Canadian curler Glenn Howard, four-time world champion, and the winner of 17 Ontario provincial championships including a record eight straight. Howard has built this middling Swiss team into the machine that was unbeaten in the round-robin stage of these Olympics. Howard came out to try to steer his team through the final shots they needed to make to take the match in that 10th end, but Mouat’s men had outmatched them. They were sitting two-up, and the Swiss missed with their final stone.
The British women weren’t so lucky. They beat Italy 7-4, their third-straight victory, it gave them a 5-4 record for the tournament, which was good enough to get the men through, but the women needed Switzerland to beat the USA if they were going to make it too. They came a couple of inches away from doing it, which seemed pretty unlikely when the US team were 6-3 up on the Swiss going into the 10th end. But the Swiss skip pulled off an improbable shot to equalise the game with the very final stone. That meant the game went to an extra end.
“A couple of us had no idea what we needed to happen. I was one of those people. Once we won our game, I said, ‘What’s going on now?’” said British skip Becky Morrison. “I had no idea. Whereas a couple of us knew, I didn’t have a clue what was going on to the side of us because I was just focused on what we were doing on the ice.”
The extra end between Switzerland and the USA also came down to the hammer, with the US skip needing to land a draw on the button to win it.
“I watched the shot by shot and listened to the cheers,” Sophie Jackson said. “I sat with the girls and Rebecca, it was quite a weird one. Just gutted.
“But we’re very, very proud of the performances, overall, I think we were one of the best teams here by the end of the week, so it’s just a shame we didn’t start a little quicker. For three of our first Olympics, I think we did amazingly well and we can walk away proud.”
