Canada went 2-1 on opening day

#Nagano25Years – Chapter 9, February 9, 1998

(Previous chapters are either on this site or at The Curling Guy Facebook page.) 

February 9 was finally game day in Karuizawa, and the Canadians had fully recovered from our snowboarding injuries.

Both skips, Mike Harris and Sandra Schmirler, seemed to have a good head on their shoulders.

“If you start putting pressure on yourself to win the gold medal, you’ll just make yourself crazy,” Mike told the media. “Our goal is to try and play well and not pay too much attention to the other stuff. If we play as well as we can, we’d have to be satisfied.”

Sandra was so funny, she had her own word to describe her team’s mission – schlunk.

“There will be a lot of good teams here and you can’t just schlunk your way through,” she said. “They’ll have the best teams in the world for this, no schlunky teams.”

The Schmirler girls started first, and won 7-6 over Lisa Schoeneberg’s Team USA. There they are taking their first slides at the start of the game, above.

Canada had a 7-2 lead after five but the Americans took two in the sixth, and stole both the seventh and eighth to close the gap. Sandra didn’t have to throw her final stone of the 10th end when Lisa threw heavy on her last one.

Later on the gals played their first night game, and lost 6-5 in an extra-end to Dordi Nordby of Norway. You have to love Nordby, who retired in 2006 after Olympic appearances at Salt Lake 2002 and Turin 2006 (where she lost the bronze game to Canada’s Shannon Kleibrink). What a character.

We played one game on opening day, the afternoon draw against hosts Japan. Here’s what I wrote after the match on our team sponsor’s website, my first effort at this new thing called “blogging.”

Tonight we finally got onto the ice and played our first game, a 7-4 win over the host nation, Japan. We had complete control of the game all the way, even when they stole a point to tie it up at 4-4 after seven ends, but tricky rocks left little room for error.

The arena was fairly packed, with the Japanese and Canadian contingents making the most noise, battling each other for booster honours. Although we have a natural bias, we’ll have to give the nod to the hosts, due to their massive flags and beating drums. A unique experience for the average Canadian curler.

Let me emphasize, 25 years later, just how loud it was. It was nuts. And these were rookie curling fans, so when young Japan skip Makoto Tsuruga missed a blank attempt and nosed a stone in the rings, the crowd erupted in joy at the point that was scored.

Japanese curling, and the nation’s comprehension and appreciation of the sport, has certainly grown by leaps and bounds over the last 25 years.

The ice is quite fast, resembling the old faithful Brampton Curling Club in our area. That’s a reference to the speed (25 seconds and up) and not the curl. Brampton has no curl, and there is definitely “curling” ice in Karuizawa!

(For anyone wondering, Brampton eventually realized the name of the game is “curling” and in addition to fast ice, the facility’s stones have been moving quite well for some years now.)

Tomorrow morning—that’s morning for us, heaven knows what time or even day it will be for you folks back in Canada—we play Tim Somerville's USA team, and then “Great Britain” which is of course a Scottish team, skipped by Douglas Dryburgh.

Dryburgh, by the way, beat Norway’s Eigil Ramsfjell 4-2 in that opening men’s draw, so we figured we’d probably be in for a tough game. Eigil had beaten us in the semifinal of the Bull Trophy tournament in Switzerland almost a month earlier.

I think by the second day of competition, we started figuring out fun stuff to do between games. There might be some of those pics for show within the next two chapters, either on this site or at the Facebook page.