Team Homan in ‘deep hole’ after losing third straight at Olympics

Rachel Homan and team Canada suffers another heartbreaking loss, dropping an extra end effort to Denmark, putting their record at 0-3 to start the competition.

GANGNEUNG, South Korea — Since he arrived here at his second Olympic Games, Ben Hebert has taken in short-track speed skating, a Canadian women’s hockey victory, and he has plans to watch speed skating in the big oval in the days ahead.

Yes, the lead for Team Koe is having a good time so far, but it’s not just because of the extra-curricular events outside of his curling games.

“It’s always fun when you’re winning, right?” Hebert said, grinning. On Friday, Team Koe — skip Kevin Koe, third Marc Kennedy, second Brent Laing and Hebert — rattled off a fourth straight win, this time over the hometown Korean rink, to move to a perfect 4-0.

“I liked that one,” said Kennedy, after the 7–6 victory. “It was the most relaxed game we played, everyone was feeling good and having fun and sometimes that’s when you have your best results.

“When you get off to a good start it allows you to have more fun and ironically that’s when you start playing your best.”

Yes, Team Canada is feeling really good right about now. But it’s a far different picture on the women’s side. Both these teams came in trying to defend gold medals won four years ago on this stage, and the men are off to the start everyone expected. The women, not so much.

They’re in last place.

Oh-and-three. Nobody expected this from the reigning world champions. Nobody expected this from skip Rachel Homan and her rink from the nation’s capital. They’re the only winless team on the women’s side of the curling draw. On Friday, they lost in extra ends to Denmark, the country ranked ninth in the world.

Homan, Emma Miskew, Joanne Courtney and Lisa Weagle aren’t out of this one, not quite. Four years ago, two teams qualified for the playoffs with four losses. As Homan pointed out after dropping an extra-ends 9-8 decision to Denmark, “teams qualify with three losses all the time, so we just gotta keep going.”

But they’re in a deep hole, for sure.

That said, the men’s side is confident the women will dig their way out.

“I think they’re struggling with a little bit of confidence, but if they get one win under their belt and can start to get confident, look out,” Koe said. “They’re the world champs and it’s no fluke.”

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Next up, Team Homan will take on the Americans. They need to win five and maybe even six games — run the table in the rest of the round robin, essentially — to stay alive here. They have some difficult tests ahead, against teams like Switzerland, Japan and Great Britain.

As Denmark skip Madeline Dupont pointed out after what she called an “unexpected” win over Team Homan, “You can feel that they’re not their usual selves.”

On Friday, Homan curled at a game-low 66 per cent efficiency. At the Olympic Trials, where this team took down Olympic champions (Team Jones) and Canadian champions to qualify for this berth, she regularly hit the high 80s and 90s.

The miss of the game came on the skip’s final rock in the extra end, when she struck a guard on an attempted takeout.

The moment of the game, however, came earlier, in the fifth. That’s when a member of the Denmark rink knocked a rock with her broom — she burned the rock, in other words — just before it settled in the house.

In this case, the non-offending team has to make the call: They can remove the rock that was touched, leave it where it stands or shift it to where they believe it would have stopped. The rock hardly changed paths, and left Denmark sitting two. Homan swooped in and immediately removed it.

Joan McCusker, a former Olympic gold medallist, called it a “rash move” on the CBC broadcast, and said “they should have left it in play,” based on etiquette. “It doesn’t look good on you,” McCusker added.

Canada went on to score four points in that fifth end. But, in the end, those points didn’t help.

Homan didn’t have much to say after her loss. Of the offending rock against Denmark, she offered: “Burning a rock is not something that you can do. It’s just the rules, I guess.”

Dupont said were she in that situation, she wouldn’t have removed the rock. But Homan’s decision, she added, “made the win sweeter.”

Still, Dupont has a feeling Canada isn’t done here, that they’re going to come back.

“It would be unexpected if they didn’t. But you never know,” she said. “After all, they’ve lost to us.”

What’s for certain is they’ll have the support of their teammates as they take on the Americans on Saturday, and going forward. Team Koe will be watching and cheering them on, for certain.

“We’ve been getting a couple good breaks, they a got couple bad breaks, but we feel a little bit bad for them — they’re under the microscope and they’re in a tough position,” said Hebert. “The good thing for them is they’re the reigning world champs and they ran through this stuff undefeated before [at worlds last year] and we’re behind them as a big Team Canada. We think they can get hot and do it again.”

Kennedy seconded that.

“We’ve got their backs, and I think that Canada really needs to support them right now,” he said. “And, to be honest, I think it’s just going to make for a better story for them when it’s all over.”

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