SOCHI, RUSSIA– The most unexpected and possibly best victory lap of these Games just happened at Sochi’s Ice Cube—yes, the curling venue.
A Canada flag was chucked down from the rafters and nabbed by E.J. Harnden, the second on a Canadian team that minutes earlier rolled over Great Britain in the gold medal final. Then the guys got on the corners and started a slow lap, jogging around the baby blue perimeter as a largely Canadian crowd rang cowbells, shook signs and hollered.
“E.J. said, ‘You wanna do a victory lap?’ I think we all said, ‘ya,'” says skip, Brad Jacobs, grinning. “And I think I even said, ‘We can do whatever we want right now.'”
It was another big night for Canada at the Cube, on the heels of the women’s victory Thursday, to complete the curling sweep. The GBR rink, led by two-time world champion skip David Murdoch, conceded through eight ends. Canada, which opened the game with a deuce and added three more in the third, won 9–3. It was, in Jacobs’s words, “a blowout.”
And it came after British coach Soren Gran criticized a Canadian team he felt played with too much aggression and fire. These guys, most of them hailing from Sault Ste. Marie, love their fist-pumps, they slam their brooms when things don’t go right, and sometimes they race down the ice after their rocks. As Harnden put it, “We live and we die with every shot.”
The criticism just added to their fire. Says Jacobs: “We believe in karma.”
The Canadians didn’t show much of that intensity tonight, though, aside from man-hugs and high-fives and throwing their brooms to the ground after they’d clinched the win. Jacobs said the game wasn’t close enough to warrant it.
This is a Canadian team that struggled to a 1-2 record to open the tournament, then rattled out eight straight Ws and saved the crushing defeat for the finale. “We just put our heads down and we curled as hard as we possibly could,” Jacobs says.
Canada’s third straight men’s curling gold comes from a team you might mistake for bobsleigh brakemen. Everybody’s biceps are forcing the material of their sleeves to give a little on those curling jerseys, hence the nickname: “The Buff Boys.”
The plan, now, for Team Canada? Third Ryan Fry had one word for it: “Beer.”