Two steps forward, one step back. That has been the pattern for Great Britain’s mixed doubles curlers so far at these Olympic Games. But despite a 7-5 loss to Italyon Saturday, Bruce Mouat and Jen Dodds believe they can make a medal push – with the help of the “super powers” in Mouat’s Team GB cap.
Mouat decided to start wearing the cap in matches after mixed performances in the opening three games, and he believes his form is now coming to the boil as a result. “It’s a wee bit of a superstition,” he said. “I didn’t play very well in the first three games and I was quite disappointed, so I put the hat on and it has got super powers, apparently.
“Potentially I play better with it on. Maybe it’s a vanity thing, my hair is all over the place. It just covers up a bad-hair day and people don’t worry about my hair, so I don’t worry about it.”
Mouat said the idea of wearing a hat had first occurred to him in the Champions Cup final in the grand slam bubble last year. “The commentators were slagging me off for having quiffs and stuff in my hair,” he said. “The next day we were playing and I put a hat on, and someone made a Twitter account with it. I just kept it going and I think there are more Twitter followers on that than my own account now.”
But while Mouat and Dodds are playing better, they know that one false step could end their dream of a mixed curling medal. After the Italy defeat they stand fourth, with four wins and two losses in their round-robin games. Two wins from their remaining three against China, Norway and the United States will surely be enough to make it to the semi-finals.
“We’re pretty happy with how we’re doing,” he said. “It looks like a lot of teams are beating each other. The ideal situation is that we win all three of our remaining games and then we’re on seven, which would be nice. Six is the goal, though, and two wins out of the next three would be amazing.”
Elsewhere, there were a series of disappointing British performances on the first day of the Games, including from Katie Ormerod in the snowboard slopestyle. Four years ago in Pyeongchang, Ormerod broke her heel in a fall that required seven operations. This time, in temperatures of -20C, she froze in the women’s slopestyle qualification, finishing 19th to miss out on the final.
But the 24-year-old remained upbeat after two disappointing runs of 47.38 and 44.01, mainly because it meant so much to her to become an Olympian. “I stood at the top before my first run when I was about to drop in and I was like: ‘Wow, this is my moment, I’ve become an Olympian, finally’,” she said.
“It was a really special moment and just to land that first run and get down, I’ve never felt a feeling like that. It was pure joy, and I’m so proud of myself for everything I’ve gone through, to finally get there again.”
There was no joy either in the short track speed skating as Kathryn Thomson crashed within 15 seconds in the women’s 500m, Niall Treacy had a spill in the men’s 1000m, and his brother Farrell finished last after he thought he heard the bell and attempted a sprint finish a lap too early.
Farrell revealed that he overcame “crazy anxiety” to reach the starting line in Beijing after testing positive for coronavirus in mid-January. “I got Covid before I came, and with the protocols in China, it was looking very unlikely that I was even going to be here,” said the 26-year-old, who made his Olympic Games debut in Pyeongchang in 2018.
“Ten days of isolation is not fantastic when you’ve got the Games coming up, and I only came out here on Tuesday. Even before then I was having Covid tests every day to try to get negatives.”
Rupert Staudinger sits 24th after the first two luge runs in the men’s singles, but he was able to make headlines for different reasons by wearing a special helmet in tribute to his former team-mate and three-times Olympian AJ Rosen, who died of cancer in December.
“He played a huge part in my career and I decided that it’s a little thing to keep his memory alive,” said Staudinger, whose helmet said “rest in peace AJ”.
“He was such a great guy. I’m a little bit speechless because it’s ever so sad that he’s not here any more. I had to get special permission to have the message on the helmet; it had to go through the IOC. But that wasn’t a problem.”
