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Newsletter by Keiran Gorsky, Dan Plouffe & Martin Cleary
Rachel Homan and Emma Miskew got off to a dream start in their hunt for an elusive Olympic medal in women’s curling, brushing aside Denmark’s Team Madeleine Dupont 10-4 in just seven ends.
The Ottawa duo have won just about everything there is to win in women’s curling up to this point – five Scotties Tournaments of Hearts, three World Curling Championships and a record 20 Grand Slam titles. Their comparatively brief Olympic outings make for the lone genuine blemish on their storied careers.
Dupont played a lead role in Team Homan’s swift and shocking departure from PyeongChang in 2018. In an aggressively amicable sport so defined by good sportsmanship that most officiating is entrusted to its competitors, Canada’s third preliminary round game caused a rare stir – Homan controversially opted to remove a burned Danish rock in a fifth end where they went on to score four points.
Denmark stormed back to win that game 9-8, handing Canada their third straight loss to open the competition. Homan and co. came just short of the semifinals with a 4-5 record after nine preliminary games in 2018.
Eight years on, Miskew refused to single any one team out before the main event.
“Every team that qualifies for the Olympics qualifies deservingly,” the Brookfield High School grad told the Ottawa Sports Pages’ Keiran Gorsky in an interview before she left for Italy. “If you focus too much on one or two teams, someone else will sneak in there and get you.”
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But it’s hard to imagine this victory wasn’t just a little sweeter. Dupont was also one of a select few with any kind of success against the Canadians this past season, trouncing Team Homan 8-1 at the AMJ Campbell Shorty Jenkins Classic last September in Cornwall.
The Danes got off to a promising start in the early morning. A carefully-placed three-stone guard made it difficult for Homan to reach the house on her final throw of the third end. Her final shot sent a Canadian guard stone all the way through the house, as Denmark stole a point to take a 3-2 lead.
But Homan quickly quashed any hope of a repeat with a decisive fifth end. The Canadians built a five-stone cluster around the button the Danes continually failed to disrupt. Dupont tried to brute force her way out of the mess on her final shot, but only managed to clear a single red stone. Homan stole four points to take a 7-3 lead.
“I think we made a pile of shots early, and it felt pretty comfortable,” Homan noted after the game via the Canadian Olympic Committee.
Miskew and lead Sarah Wilkes guided Homan’s final shot into the button to draw three in the seventh and final end, after which Denmark conceded.
“It’s a great start, obviously,” said Homan. “It’s really great to (get) the first one under your belt (before) the (rest of the) day off. It was a really great performance by my team.”
Homan will return to action on Friday afternoon to take on Team Tabitha Peterson of the United States, who are 1-0 after an 8-4 win over South Korea.
‘You can be an Olympian’ Colgate goalie coach told Ottawa’s Kayle Osborne
Kayle Osborne and injured team captain Marie-Philip Poulin watched on from up high as Canada’s women’s hockey team bounced back from their dismal showing against the U.S. with a 5-0 win over Finland. The Munster goaltender might well spend the rest of the competition in the rafters, but Chris Cobb, her goaltending coach at Colgate University, knows how hard she worked to make her first Olympic team at age 23.
Now the closest friends, Osborne enjoys nothing more than to rib Cobb for his unwilling absence in her freshman year. Recovering from a back surgery, Cobb was unable to join her for her first season on the ice.
“A very sarcastic story she likes to remind me of,” laughed Cobb, who just returned from a training camp in Austria with debilitating jet lag and a bad cold.
As Osborne detailed before the Games in conversation with the Sports Pages’ Gorsky, Cobb didn’t actually get to see her play in-person until the Colgate Raiders came to play his local University of Vermont Catamounts. It only took a single viewing.
“‘You can be an Olympian,’” Cobb remembered telling the John McCrae Secondary School grad after that game. “You know, coaches look for size in goaltending and it drives me nuts because size doesn’t always win. You have to have athleticism, you have to compete. And she had all of that.”
Cobb would make weekly eight-hour round trips to Clinton and Hamilton in central New York State, where he would split his coaching time between Hamilton College, an NCAA Division III team, and Colgate, where he trained with Osborne and her tandem partner Hannah Murphy, now of the PWHL’s Seattle Torrent.
Osborne’s talent was never in question, but Cobb quickly learned that Osborne was also eminently coachable. The Ottawa Lady Sens product was never one to throw on her equipment and leap onto the ice in practice – insistently, she would arrive early to the rink and warm up in the training room, even if it ate up sizable chunks of her day.
Cobb sees this perfected preparedness as something of a replacement for the carefully constructed shells so many of her peers retreat into on game day. Osborne, on game days, is as cheerful and talkative as ever.
“Some athletes have to journal five minutes a day or do breathing exercises or whatever it is,” Cobb explained. “[Kayle] doesn’t do a lot of that stuff. Basically none of it. It’s more the physical preparation.”
Cobb saw that firsthand when she joined him to coach at the summer camps he runs in Las Vegas. Osborne displayed a unique talent for connecting with children and providing quick and actionable feedback.
It wasn’t totally dissimilar to the way she pours over her own highlight footage after games and diagnoses her own problems.
“She could watch her games afterwards and basically coach herself,” Cobb recalled. “Obviously, it helps to have someone to go over it with and talk it through and the different situations you see. But like, she’s just able to apply feedback instantly.”
It’s been a great gift for Cobb to see her develop even further with the New York Sirens in the PWHL. Thinking back to his back-aching treks between Vermont and New York, there’s little question.
“Crazy, right?” Cobb said of his commutes. “Looking back on it, I’m like, ‘What was I doing?’ But it was worth it, you know, to see her become an Olympian.”
Emily Clark of the Ottawa Charge scored two goals in Canada’s win over Finland. Ottawa PWHLers Brianne Jenner and Jocelyne Larocque each recorded more than 18 minutes of ice time. Charge netminder Sanni Ahola stopped 18 of 23 shots while defender Ronja Savolainen had 20:50 of ice time for Finland.
Isabelle Weidemann takes second fifth-place finish in women’s long-distance speed skating
In her warmup before the women’s 5000 metres, her final individual event at the Olympics, speed skater Isabelle Weidemann was dancing.
“I wanted to have fun today,” the 30-year-old Gloucester Concordes product smiled in a post-race interview with CBC. “I don’t know how many more 5Ks I’ve got left in my career and so I wanted to make sure I enjoyed it the whole time.”
The “bittersweet” race that followed served as a testament to the heightened level of competition at these Olympics. The top four skaters all finished within three tenths of a second of each other. Weidemann finished in fifth with a time of 6:50.08.
The Colonel By Secondary School grad was paired with her friend and rival Ragne Wiklund of Norway, arguably the gold medal favourite heading into the afternoon, being the long-distance leader on the ISU World Cup circuit. Weidemann’s coach Remmelt Eldering felt it was a perfect matchup, noting Weidemann’s intensity when she has a “bird to chase.”
As per usual, Weidemann’s plan was to gather speed like a locomotive. She didn’t expect to compete with a blazer like Wiklund from the firing of the starting pistol, but hoped to catch her when fatigue inevitably set in. Try though she did, Weidemann was never able to kick into high gear.
“I’m disappointed, to be honest,” she indicated after the race. “I really wanted to be on the podium, real badly. I just didn’t have it. The first lap in, I was like, whoa this is really fast.”
Wiklund, who was on pace to top the podium, slowed dramatically in her final lap, finishing just shy of Merel Conijn’s time of 6:46.27. Weidemann still finished nearly four seconds behind the Norwegian. Wiklund fell to third place as Francesca Lollobrigida once again confounded expectations to claim gold.
“I’ve had these moments throughout the season where suddenly it clicks and, oh yeah, there’s the speed,” Weidemann lamented. “But I just didn’t have it. Eight laps to go and I’m like, ‘oh my gosh, eight laps to go.’”
Weidemann had been quite open about her changing profile as a skater as Milano Cortina approached, even as she entered the Olympics in fine form. In hot pursuit of peak performance, going the extra mile in practice hasn’t always been possible.
WATCH CBC SPORTS | Canadian speed skater Isabelle Weidemann discusses key to longevity in sport
Back in Canada, Mike Rivet, Weidemann’s childhood coach, was watching the event with one Tony Winterink, his own childhood coach with a wonderful case of nominative determinism. Rivet tried to bring a little optimism to the table.
“I’m super happy for her. I mean, she’s got two top five, which is, you know, pretty amazing when you think of it at the Olympic level,” offered Rivet, the Sports Pages’ forcibly appointed speed skating analyst through these Olympics. “I’m sure that she probably would have wished for a different outcome. But, yeah, I’m so happy for her, and I’m proud of her.”
Weidemann will have one final opportunity to earn a medal when she competes in women’s team pursuit alongside Ivanie Blondin, where Canada are considered top contenders. The quarterfinals will take place on Saturday.
Valérie Grenier’s hard luck Olympics persist
“Come on, believe in it,” came a coach’s voice over the team radio before Valérie Grenier flew out from the gate, even as 10 of her predecessors had failed to finish their runs. “It definitely pays to be active and aggressive through here, attacking.”
Grenier and 42 competitors were pitted against a thick layer of fog at the top of the course on a dreary afternoon in Cortina d’Ampezzo for the women’s super-G.
Attack though she did, headfirst into the mist, Grenier’s misfortune at these Olympics continued on. Stumbling in the early goings of her run, the 29-year-old swivelled awkwardly through the subsequent gate before spiralling off the course altogether at the twisty “Gran curvone” section of slope.
The Mont-Tremblant alpine skier from St. Isidore, ON has been less than her best in Italy, finishing 20th in her downhill portion of Tuesday’s team combined event and being disqualified from her opening downhill run for a late start.
She was in better company today, being one of 17 competitors to record a DNF, including downhill gold medalist Breezy Johnson and Canadian national teammate Cassidy Gray of Invermere, B.C.
Grenier has a tremendous opportunity to rebound on Sunday when she competes in the giant slalom – historically, her best event by far. Four of her five career World Cup podium finishes have come in the discipline, including a third-place finish in December on her home course at Tremblant.
Grenier has recorded DNFs in her two Olympic giant slalom runs in Beijing and PyeongChang.
Finally, in cross-country skiing, Katherine Stewart-Jones remained steadily in the 30s and 40s all throughout the women’s 10 km interval start en route to a 47th place finish. The skiers saw some of the warmer temperatures of these Olympics as some opted to lop off their uniform sleeves.
Her 20-year-old national teammate Alison Mackie stunned with an eighth-place finish, marking the best Canadian individual cross-country skiing result in 20 years. Mackie finished about 30 seconds behind bronze medallist Jessie Diggins of the USA.
Ottawa Olympians in action on Feb. 12:
Day 7 Preview: Family’s sporting tradition fuels first-time Olympic biathlete Zach Connelly
Zach Connelly’s skis have carried him around the world, all the way to the Winter Olympic Games, but the 24-year-old still remembers the first time he strapped ’em on was much less pleasant.
“I couldn’t go 10 metres without falling on my face,” recounted Connelly. “It was really rough.”
So Connelly went back home, watched some youtube videos, and figured out how to ski in a couple hours, he says.
“That night I drove back here and skied for another hour-and-a-half with my mom,” recalled the Chelsea Nordiq product in a 2019 interview with Dan Plouffe of the Ottawa Sports Pages, which has not received a reply to interview requests in advance of the Olympics. “And from there, the love of the sport just kind of came naturally.
“I love being on the snow, out in the forest, just being on my own. Hearing the sound of the snow when you push and just feeling the wind on your face, the dopamine high that you get from doing exercise – it’s all there and it’s all hitting you at the same time. It just puts a smile on my face. It’s really beautiful.”
Not everyone’s reaction to face-planting repeatedly would be to get right back it. But that’s not the Connelly way, explained the member of a driven family of ironman triathletes and marathoners.
“I don’t know. I kind of had that feeling of if I’m gonna do this, I want to do it right and I want to be the best,” signalled Connelly, who joined Army Cadets at age 12 and first tried biathlon near the Canada Aviation and Space Museum. “I wanted to go out and just enjoy racing, having fun, and making every moment count.”
After graduating from Louis-Riel high school, Connelly moved out west to join the national team’s development centre. He’s gradually and consistently gained ground and established himself as one of Canada’s top biathletes in recent years while gaining international race experience in the IBU Cup and World Cup circuits, twice cracking the top-50 in individual races on the top tour.
He was part of Team Canada’s mad dash into the top-20 at the recent IBU Nations Cup to secure Canadian men a relay team berth and four Olympic biathlon slots. Canada earned just enough points to squeak in.
“Damn, that was hard,” team veteran Adam Runnalls wrote on social media after the fact.
The men’s relay team will have a hard act to follow after surprising the world with a sixth-place finish at the Beijing 2022 Olympics. Connelly’s top result will likely come in the relay, and while he’s not expected to contend for the top individually, Friday’s men’s 10 km sprint competition provides the chance to move up from his 66th-place showing in Tuesday’s men’s 20 km individual event when he was handcuffed by six missed targets out of 20 on the shooting range.
“Generally, his skiing is quite strong. His shooting can be very good, but for sure, his strength lies in his skiing,” national team coach Andrew Chisholm noted in an interview with the Ottawa Sports Pages’ Keiran Gorsky before the Games. “He works incredibly hard, for sure.”
Also in action on Friday: Rachel Homan and Emma Miskew will look to feed off their rock-solid start in the women’s curling competition when they take on USA.
