It took Switzerland’s Team Yannick Schwaller until the second-to-last Grand Slam of Curling event of the previous quadrennial to win.
Now, they’ve won the first Slam of the new quad after crushing Norway’s Magnus Ramsfjell 7-3 on Sunday to claim the Co-op Invitational title in Victoria.
“It’s amazing,” Schwaller said in an interview with the GSOC broadcast afterwards. “Honestly when we got into the semis, I thought it would be nice to grab that (first Slam victory of the new quadrennial) to kind of check that away and have the rest of the cycle (be) a bit of, yeah, freedom in that regard.”
It’s the second Grand Slam title they’ve won in the last three events. Schwaller’s fourth stone thrower, Benoit Schwarz Van-Berkel, had one previous Slam title before joining the Swiss squad.
With the win, they proved their worth as the No. 1 ranked team in the world. But honestly, this has been building for a couple of seasons.
“It’s really been a progression over two years of slowly having, you know, a very good structure to the team,” Schwaller said. “There’s so much leadership in that team, so everybody is pulling ahead and trying everything to kind of work hard and getting the last percentages. So, that’s really what it was, and now I guess it’s finally clicking as well.”
Schwaller’s rink was one of the few teams that stayed together in the off-season, despite the typical end-of-quadrennial mass changes that occurred. Now, four events into this season, this is the team's third title.
Benoit Schwarz Van-Berkel makes the hard look easy
Van-Berkel has yet to find a challenging shot he couldn't make.
And even if there are times his confidence wanes, his teammates step up and show him they trust he'll get the job done.
In the sixth end, when Schwaller’s team had unofficially won the title up 7-1, Ramsfjell’s team made a couple of shots to put a little scare into the Swiss rink. They had four red stones in the house, scoring as shots one, two and three.
The triple was there with enough weight, but Van-Berkel wasn’t convinced and wanted to play another shot. After discussing it over, Schwaller’s team elected to throw the triple.
Van-Berkel made the shot look easy, hitting the first stone in the perfect spot to launch the other two, including one going back up the rings, out of play. Afterwards, the lethal Swiss thrower let out a big grin as if to say: “Why was I even worried?”
Nerves show in Ramsfjell’s first final
It wasn’t hard to tell this was Team Ramsfjell’s first Grand Slam of Curling final, and not in a good way.
While the rest of Ramsfjell’s team played serviceable to great games — Bendik Ramsfjell, the second, had a 100 per cent ace rating — the nerves struck skip Magnus Ramsfjell.
Overall, he had an ace percentage of 44, while the field percentage for the shots he was facing was 70. This put him at a minus-25 in terms of the edge stat.
The ace percentage is how a curler is performing during the match — each shot is graded out of five and only fours and fives are considered made. Field percentage takes into account what every player from the GSOC Tour would shoot on average if they were playing the same type of shots.
The edge stat shows how much better or worse a curler is performing against the field.
After making a questionable call in the second end to blank instead of just taking the single point — you’re only allowed one blank per game in Grand Slams — the game’s fate was sealed after the third end.
Ramsfjell, with the hammer, was facing four of Schwaller’s stones in the four-foot as he went to throw his final shot. He elected to play the draw, knowing the risk he was running. When Ramsfjell let go of the rock and it travelled down the ice, there was no sense of panic among the sweepers. But as the rock sailed past the top four-foot (their only chance at hitting backing), the realization hit.
It was a steal of four for Schwaller to go up 5-0, basically ending the game.
The next stop on the Slam tour is the GSOC Masters, happening Nov. 3-8 in Medicine Hat, Alta.
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