The 2009-2010 Capital One Grand Slam of Curling will kick off the year in Mississauga, ON October 21-25 with a field of nine international Olympic qualifiers and possible qualifiers and five Canadian Olympic Trials qualifiers. Randy Ferbey and Kevin Koe of Edmonton along with Brad Gushue of St. John’s, NL were recently added to fill out the fourteen team field.
The tournament will be an interesting preview of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver taking place in February. For the nine international teams the strength of the field will give them a taste of the depth of a typical Brier field. It will be intriguing to see how these teams do in a field this strong as well as how Kevin Martin’s team bounces back after the disappointment of losing three straight games to David Murdoch at the 2009 world championship.
The final Canadian invitations were given to Koe and Ferbey after receiving the final two direct births in the Canadian Olympic trials and Gushue was invited as the 2006 Olympic gold medalist.
The fourteen teams invited to compete are:
Tickets and ticket packages are available through Ticketmaster.
Cortina D’Ampezzo, Italy is hosting the 2009 World Mixed Doubles Curling Championship this week. There are twenty-seven teams consisting of one female and one male curler from across the globe competing for the title.
An end consists of five stones per team with one team member throwing the first and last stones of the end while the other member throws rocks two through 4.
Prior to the start of each end, one team shall instruct the game umpire to place their team’s stationary stone and the opposing team’s stationary stone either as a guard outside the house bisecting the centre line or on the back half of the button. The positioned stones cannot be removed until the fourth stone.
The rules for this event don’t exactly lend itself to anybody caring. What ever happened to the thought of actually throwing the stones into those positions instead of having an umpire place them there? Doesn’t that take some skill out of the game?
It seems like a way for curling to pander themselves to the International Olympic Committee to have another curling event at the Olympics. I’d love to hear other people’s opinions on this event.
Feel free to comment with your opinions on Mixed Doubles.
Let me get this over right away. I was wrong about David Murdoch’s Scottish team.
I still believe the worlds field is a lot weaker than the Brier field - except for David Murdoch. There are two levels of teams at the World Championship level for men’s curling: Scotland and Canada, then everybody else. So, I don’t take that part of my previous post back. But I do take back what I said about Murdoch not being able to qualify for the Brier out of the more difficult provinces in Canada. Clearly, he can.
Who would have thought any team in the world could have beaten Kevin Martin three times in row? There were a lot of people (including me) who thought this team was close to curling invincibility. Teams all over Canada are going to be analyzing those three losses to see the strategy Murdoch employed to take down the giants. One loss to Scotland or anybody could have been considered a fluke, a bad game or lack of focus. Three losses clearly demonstrate an Achiles heel in the Martin machine.
Now the questions that come to my mind are how much are these three losses going to affect Kevin Martin and the rest of his squad? What about the strategy in the tenth end of the final? For a long, long time their minds are going to be occupied with thoughts of not peeling earlier in the end and, of course, throwing the first skip stone away. These are all things that have broken up many good teams.
We are all going to see just how strong of a unit Martin’s team is in the next year and whether they can avoid the team in-fighting that lesser teams suffer. It was clear that Ben Hebert and Marc Kennedy were less than happy with the play of John Morris in the final and we all saw Hebert’s reaction to Martin throwing away his second to last stone in the world final. If this team wants to win a gold medal at the Olympics in Vancouver next year, they will have to get over this loss very quickly. I guarantee you the teams of Glenn Howard, Randy Ferbey, Jeff Stoughton and Brad Gushue already smell blood in the water.
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