LAOLA curling coverage

The RE/Max Women’s Masters and other Eurocurling events are also available online through a new agreement with Switzerland’s LAOLA TV.

The deal covers Curling Champions Tour events in Europe, such as the Masters, and also the upcoming best-of-seven Swiss Olympic Trials playoff between Ralph Stoeckli and Stefan Karnusian, which takes place this coming Monday through Wednesday, Oct. 12-14.

The LAOLA TV curling channel is available through the Champions Curling Tour website or through this direct page.

Women's Masters update

Three teams are currently 3-0 and into the playoff round at at the RE/Max Women’s Masters in Switzerland.

Sweden’s Anette Norberg, 2003 world champ Debbie McCormick of the United States and Switzerland’s Fabienne Fuerbringer are all in for Sunday’s quarter-finals.

Norberg is coming off a recent runner-up performance and McCormick, who has been struggling early this season, will be pleased with her start to this tournament.

Upset performance of the young 2010 season thus far has to be Fuerbringer, a calendar girl who managed to upset the Great Britain Olympic team, skipped by Eve Muirhead, 8-7 in an extra-end on Friday night.

The Swiss squad had previously beaten 2006 Olympic silver medallist Binia Feltscher-Beeli and 2008 world junior finalist Cissi Ostlund of Sweden.

In the Urs Raeber photo above, Team Muirhead battles England’s Kirsty Balfour in opening round action.

Another photo can be seen at The Curling News Facebook group page. Have you joined yet?

Men’s and women’s action also continues in Calgary, while men’s Tour play is ongoing in Vancouver and Brandon.

Gushue's golf tan

Moments ago, Brad Gushue’s foursome rolled to a 6-2 victory over David Sik of the Czech Republic to move to 3-0 at the Baden Masters 2009 in Switzerland.

An afternoon clash with Sweden’s Niklas Edin takes place at 1:30pm local time.

The Gushues also placed second overall in the shootout, earning them a $400 bonus... and a whoop-whoop. Ralph Stoeckli’s Swiss squad won the shootout, and $500.

The skipper looks tanned and healthy, doncha think?

[Photo by Urs Raeber]

Olympic curling season

And just like that, the 2010 Olympic curling season has begun.

After a busy summer, which saw various camps held in Ontario, Atlantic Canada, British Columbia, and Prague and Fuessen in Europe – plus the requisite summer bonspiel circuit – the ice is in and we’re underway.

The first event on the rebranded Curling Champions Tour – the former World Curling Tour Europe – is underway in Baden, Switzerland. And we can see by the Urs Raeber photo, above, that Olympic-bound Thomas Ulsrud of Norway (in white and red) has some spiffy new uniforms, while opponent Claudio Pescia of Switzerland is still wearing his four-year old green kit. Click to zoom in!

Actually, we love green, and we assume Team Pescia does too. However, the Norwegians pummelled the Swiss 10-3 to start the new Euroseason.

In other matches of note, Canada’s Brad Gushue defeated Switzerland’s Ralph Stoeckli 3-2, while Canada’s Mark Dacey was dumped 6-2 by the defending world champions from Scotland, skipped by David Murdoch.

Canada’s Randy Ferbey takes to the ice in a few minutes, against Switzerland’s Manuel Ruch.

Follow the Baden Masters 2009 results here, and be sure to check out The Curling News Facebook group for more action photos!

Why not join the group? It’s free, with a Facebook account.

In Canada, the Ontario Curling Tour Championships are also underway in Oakville, featuring both men’s and women’s draws, the latter including the Great Britain Olympic team. Eve Muirhead’s troops took out local Lynne Middaugh by an 8-3 score last night.

Another early result of interest saw Alison Goring’s brand new squad upend last year’s provincial finalists – ie. her ex-teammates, now led by Cathy Auld – by a 5-4 count. A fun bit of drawmastering from OCT chief Gerry Geurts, we surmise.

On the men’s side, four teams are 2-0 – including Joe Frans and the Lobel brothers – with Wayne Middaugh set to begin play this morning.

Game on, folks!

Canuck Curling Coaches

As faithful TCN readers already know, the Swiss coaching experiment starring Russ Howard is more-or-less over but a dual Manitoba-Swiss experiment, at the national team level, has just begun.

Yesterday’s news that Alberta’s Rennee Sonnenberg has agreed to coach the Danish Olympic women’s team is just one more example of Canada’s influence in the world of curling. And there already exists an example within Denmark: Winnipeg’s John Helston, who won the 1984 Brier with skip Mike Riley, has been working with the Olympic men’s team – skipped by Ulrik Schmidt – for a few years now.

Which brings us to another Schmidt. We understand that the U.S. Olympic teams will be jetting to Switzerland, tomorrow, for 10 days of training, accompanied with teams from Austria, the Czech Republic and Switzerland.

The training centre is the Kussnacht Curlinghalle, which just happens to be one of the stomping grounds of Rodger Schmidt, the Canadian-born curling coach who has been based in Switzerland for many years.

Schmidt, of course, is the well-regarded European columnist for The Curling News... although we dug this news up from our side of the Atlantic, using Swiss search engines and U.S.-based spies.

And the Canadian coaching beat goes on.

Swiss curling update

It’s all things Swiss in today’s The Curling News Blogpost.

Why?

Well... why not?

1. Team Mirjam Ott made some waves at the end of the 2008-09 season by replacing second Valeria Spaelty with team alternate Carmen Kueng. Spaelty was the last remaining member of Ott’s 2006 Olympic silver medallist foursome, and Kung had been the squad’s dedicated alternate the last couple of seasons.

A photo of the new Team Ott, who are pretty much confirmed to represent Switzerland at Vancouver 2010, is located here. The accompanying update states the squad will be taking a full six-month leave of absence from work to focus on the drive to Vancouver, which will include six weeks of training/touring in Canada.

2. Team Ralph Stoeckli, fourth-place finishers at the Ford Worlds in Moncton, need to win a special best-of-seven playoff against 2008 European rep Stefan Karnusian to book their tickets to Vancouver. But should they win, they will not be heading to the Games with team coach Russ Howard.

Russ has confirmed his gig with the CTV Olympic broadcast consortium – which of course features the TSN curling crew – and will be doing the suit and tie thing in Vancouver. Howard might still be jetting to Switzerland in September to do some work with the squad – this is still TBD – but he definitely won’t be wearing the white cross in February.

Here’s a photo of Howard in his Swiss duds, consulting with Stoeckli and lead Simon Struebin, who just happens to be Europe’s representative on the board of the new World Curling Players’ Association (as we revealed last month).

Back in November, you may recall that TCN scored the first photo of Russ in his new coaching career.

Speaking of photos, the CCA image above (shot by Michael Burns) shows Stoeckli in a huge fist pump just as his final throw settles into the button for a big win in Moncton.

3. But there’s another Canadian coaching saga in Switzerland... two, in fact. The husband and wife team of Lorne and Chris Hamblin have been hired as Swiss Curling’s new national team coaches.

According to the Winnipeg Free Press story, Hamblin said he and his wife only wanted a chance to coach at a high level and the Swiss opportunity came along before any other. “If there had been similar opportunities in Canada," said Hamblin, “we would have pursued that. But there weren’t.”

4. Andreas “Andi” Schwaller has hung up his boots... for now. The man who rivalled Stoeckli for Swiss skipping honours throughout this decade – winning world silver in 2001 and Olympic bronze in 2002 – has retired from competition... but perhaps only for a year, as this story would indicate.

You can also listen to a radio interview with Schwaller – in German, of course – on this page.


So, there you go. Anything else for the rest of this North American holiday week?

• CTV’s retrospective Olympic features titled “Where Are They Now?” includes Joan McCusker, and that famed 1998 Olympic championship squad ...

• Sudbury, Ontario is currently hosting its annual Dominion Amethyst Curling Camp, which is previewed here and also featured here ...

• Three-quarters of Team Jennifer Jones made an appearance last weekend in Blackfalds, Alberta ...

• Kansas City, USA curling action takes place on Monday nights through August 31 ...

• And finally, the New Zealand curling championships started today, with the finals set to wrap up on Sunday ...

Curling Camps: the HOT SHOTS

Our second posting in a series on summer curling camps focusses on the original “Fantasy” camp which has since dropped the moniker: the HOT SHOTS.

Now in it’s 15th year, the HOT SHOTS Curling Camp was the first camp to pioneer the “fantasy” concept of pairing high-performance elite competitors with the participants, who of course range anwhere from brand-new rookie to pretty accomplished competitive player (and all points in between).

The subtle name change has, in the words of veteran camp director David Gravelle, come about because “you the curlers, have demanded more from us. And, we’ve delivered.

“We’ve moved away from the celebrity participation to bring you more intense curriculum with highly qualified instructors and some of the top national and international coaches.

“This transformation has been a natural and gradual evolution of our sport with increased participation in the game but the lack of qualified instruction to keep our new curlers progressing on the path to increased enjoyment of this great game.”

There are three HOT SHOTS Curling Camps running this summer-slash-fall, and there are limited spaces available at all three.

First up is the traditional home of the HOT SHOTS, the Oakville Curling Club in Oakville, Ontario (one half-hour west of Toronto) on August 28-20. The second camp is on Ottawa, Ontario at the RA Centre on October 2-4, and the final camp is in the United States for the second consecutive year. The Utica Curling Club in Utica, New York is one of the oldest curling clubs in the USA and it hosts the HOT SHOTS from October 16-18.

Click here for the camp website and here for the registration page.

Anything else going on? But... of course...


• Those crazy Kiwis are working to launch another season of outdoor curling at Naseby, following a $200,000 rink upgrade ...

• Here’s a report on the recent Rocky Top Bonspiel held in Knoxville, Tenessee ...

• Joel Retournaz – that Italian Olympic hero from three-plus years ago – is back with a new youthful team, ie. an “ambitious project: ...

• PEI’s world junior runner-up Brett Gallant has picked up two local awards ...

• CTV News says the Banff curling rink is being torn down and a new facility is scheduled to open in late 2010 ...

• Can you guess the name of the influential curling coach who dropped this zinger on us recently...?

“I must talk far too much. Dean Gemmel put my interview into two parts.”

It’s Quebec’s Dan Rafael, of course, who is the head coach of the Chinese national curling team program. Indeed, he has a two-part show posted to The Curling Show and the occasionally blunt Canadian is always a good interview. You can listen to part one here, and we can direct you to part two here.

Rafael, by the way, has been in China for a couple of weeks already, as this is officially the start of the 2010 competitive season (say what?). Fresh from Beijing and then Harbin, Rafael is now in Qinhuangdao and will train with the teams until the inaugural New Zealand Winter Games in August. After that, Teams China head to Canada for September, October and part of November until the Pacific Curing Championships in Karuizawa, Japan ...

• And finally, there is movement within the foundations of the World Curling Players’ Association. At last.

Nominations for new board positions have closed and several new board members have been acclaimed. Now representing women on the WCPA are Calgary’s Heather Rankin and Ontario’s Sherry Middaugh, while Europe’s single position has gone to Switzerland’s Simon Struebin, who throws lead pucks for front-running Olympic hopeful Ralph Stoeckli.

Voting will decide the men’s reps. Vying for a seat at the table are the following:

• Quebec’s Pierre Charette (currently Interim President)
• Vancouver’s Brent Pierce (a former WCPA regional rep)
• Scott Pfeifer, second man for Team Randy Ferbey
• Craig Savill, the Team Glenn Howard lead
• Garth Smith, who is Kerry Burtnyk’s opening rocker
• Nolan Thiessen, yet another leadman who plays for Kevin Koe.

The United States’ position features a pair of nominees, with John Benton taking on Bill Todhunter.

The new WCPA Board will consist of eight elected members, with a minimum five positions reserved for Canadian representatives. The group of five Canadian representatives will feature three male and two female members.

Read all about the nominees, their positions and the URL to go to to vote at this link ...