Last year, Eve Muirhead graced the cover of a curling calendar featuring international players, with all proceeds from sales going to charity for Canadian Spinal Research. Now she is the face of women’s world curling.
Muirhead, who could easily win a Jennifer Aniston-lookalike contest, won the 2013 world women’s curling championship on Sunday in Riga, Latvia, beating Sweden’s Margaretha Sigfridsson 6-5 in the final.
Muirhead and her team, which includes vice-skip Anna Sloan, second Vicki Adams and lead Claire Hamilton, made few errors in the entire tournament, but they were also lucky. Muirhead scored a fortuitous victory over Canada’s Rachel Homan the day before in the semi-final, stealing an 8-7 decision when her counterpart jammed on a double takeout. Muirhead carried that momentum into Sunday, beating the Swedes, who had beaten her team twice in the tournament.
While much has been made of Homan being a young skip who turns 24 on April 5, Muirhead is younger (age 22). But this is a Scot with a great background, having won four world junior titles. Her father, Gordon, won two world championships for Scotland and her brother Thomas is a member of the Scottish team that just won the world junior men’s championship.
The ascension of the great Scot to become the Queen of the World in curling in 2013 is largely a product of the success she has had in the past and a little bit of good fortune this year. She placed second in the 2010 worlds and last year, in her fourth time in the tournament, Muirhead won the Most Valuable Player Award.
So finally the long wait is over.
But Muirhead’s victory can also be attributed to how serious her country is taking curling, paying the foursome a full-time salary. Curling is their job.
“At the end of the day, we’re a sports team,” Muirhead told me back in November while competing in the Rogers Masters in Brantford. Muirhead’s team placed third. “We work hard. We train our butts off every day to get to the 2014 Olympics.”
“It’s great to travel to Canada because you know wherever you go you’re going to get great competition,” Sloan added. “There’s so many high-class teams out there. It’s something we’ve got to do to keep up to that level.”
The bitterness of placing second in this tournament is something that continues to haunt Sigfridsson, who has placed in the runner-up spot four times, including two in a row and three in the last five.
The worlds is a forerunner of the Players’ Championship, April 16-21 at the Mattamy Athletic Centre in Toronto. The tournament is the final Grand Slam event of the World Curling Tour and will have separate men’s and women’s divisions, each competing for $100,000 purses. Many of the teams that participated in the World Women’s Tournament have accepted invitations to play in the Players’. It doesn’t have the profile of the World Championship, but features a greater depth of overall talent.
Many international teams are playing in the WCT on an annual basis to gain valuable competition. It is the reason Canada can no longer enter the World Tournament as the prohibitive favourite. Other countries are gradually starting to catch up, in particular because curling received full medal status in the Olympics starting in 1998 after previously being a demonstration sport.
Scotland is an example of money pumped into a program to produce excellence.
Homan’s team has a chance to win a $100,000 bonus in the Players’. Sportsnet put the prize on the line last fall for any woman’s team which won the Masters and the Players’. Homan’s victory in Masters, their first-ever Grand Slam win, started off an incredible streak of success that continued in the zones, regionals, provincials and nationals. The Players’ also put the team far in front in the WCT money list.
Any lingering disappointment the team had with the heartbreaking loss Saturday in the semi-final was eased somewhat with an 8-6 win over the U.S. in the bronze medal game on Sunday. Now the team, which includes vice Emma Miskew, second Alison Kreviazuk and lead Lisa Weagle, returns home to Ottawa to recharge and then begin focusing on the Players’.
“All in all it was a great first worlds,” Homan’s coach Earle Morris told sportsnet.ca in a text. “We all learned lots — including it took a while for us to get comfortable. Rocks and ice were different than we were used to, but they came around and so did we, getting more relaxed in the atmosphere. There are some very good teams at the worlds — Scotland and Sweden come to mind — and some other countries impressed us including Russia, USA and Switzerland.
“Winning bronze is starting to feel better, but there is nothing like a gold medal. But it has been a fantastic year, winning the Scotties, leading the (WCT) money list and (hopefully) qualifying for the Olympic Trials.
“We will rest for about a week and then try and do well at the Players’ championship, and then it is time off until next season.”