62 Monday February 21 2022 | the times
Sport
In the closing ceremony of the Beijing
Olympics last night, Bruce Mouat, the
skip of the men’s curling team, carried
the GB flag. It seemed symbolic that the
baton had effectively been handed over
from Eve Muirhead, who had been a
flag-bearer in the opening ceremony
16 days earlier. For it is this pair and
their curling teams who have led and
carried the Team GB in this Winter
Olympics.
Many had expected Mouat’s crew to
deliver Britain’s first gold on Saturday;
however, the men who came up just
short in their final were all there by the
ice yesterday morning to cheer on
Muirhead and her team-mates Vicky
Wright, Jen Dodds and Hailey Duff as
they managed to go one better and
complete their gold-medal triumph.
It was the most emotional and com-
prehensive of victories, a 10-3 crushing
of Japan with a performance that was so
commanding that the Japanese skip
conceded the match before the tenth
and final end.
As she stood atop the medal podium
with the national anthem playing,
Muirhead finally dissolved into tears.
She has been a tower of strength not
only through this Olympic campaign
but through the previous three.
Muirhead was first skip of a British
Olympic team when she was 19. She
won a bronze in Sochi in 2014 and then
had to endure the agony, four years
later in Pyeongchang, of missing with
her last shot and blowing the chance to
win a second bronze. Ever since 2018,
she has been unable to dislodge that
final shot from her mind. Even here in
Beijing, she has talked about how it still
tortures her. “Hopefully,” she said with
the gold medal hanging round her
neck, “it will be out of my mind now.”
If there is one single stone that she is
known for, it should surely now be her
final stone in the seventh end of this
final. Her team had been dominating
this match from their 2-0 start in the
first end, yet it was the seventh that
destroyed Japan.
It had been played masterfully by the
whole team, giving Muirhead a final
shot at glory. She then delivered a
raised takeout, a stone that removed
the final Japanese red from the house
and gave Britain a four-pointer.
“It was perfect,” Wright said. “I was so
confident watching it from the other
end, I knew what it was going to do and
I knew the shot was made.
“She absolutely smashed it.”
With that, Muirhead had an 8-2 lead.
Japan chased it but, here, they were
playing a team who were infinitely
superior. It seemed that all four of
Muirhead’s team had raised their game
for this final. That ninth end became
almost impossible after the final throw
by Dodds, a double takeout delivered
with an accuracy that had become
known as “the hand of Dodds”.
Dodds, of course, had already had to
come to terms with her fourth-place
finish in the mixed doubles, with
Mouat. Yet standards on both men’s and
women’s sides were raised from what
had seemed a soul-crushing denoue-
ment 12 days earlier.
On Saturday Mouat and his men’s
team had been edged out by a masterful
Sweden side in a high-class contest that
was an unrelentingly tight, tactical
chess match. Muirhead’s victory was
completely different; Japan simply
could not match the high quality of the
Muirhead quartet.
“This is a moment I dreamt of as a
young child,” the British skip said after-
wards. “To stand on the podium and get
that gold medal round your neck is a
moment I’ll never forget.
“It’s a moment that I’ve been waiting
for for so many years.”
She and her team have certainly
done it the hard way. They did not come
to Beijing as one of the favourites;
indeed, they nearly didn’t come at all.
At the World Championships inCalgary last year, they failed to win an
Olympic qualifying place, let alone
claim a medal.
That failure triggered a complete
rethink, the team planning was restart-
ed and a new team was formed. Before
their final qualifying event, in the Neth-
erlands in December, they were hit by
two Covid cases. Then, when they ar-
rived, Wright tested positive and an
alternate player had to be flown out.
Wright’s test, however, turned out to be
a false positive.
Still it wasn’t straightforward. They
were nearly eliminated in the Nether-
lands, so they were not highly rated on
arrival in Beijing and they certainly did
not start their Olympic competition
here with anything like the form that
suggested they could win it. They only
just scraped into the semi-finals.
Yet at that point they declared that
they were a play-offs team — and they
were right. Their resilience was tested
to the limit in a high-quality semi-final
against Sweden. Their best game of all,
though, was the one that they left until
the last.
All this was watched with pride from
the side of the rink by Rhona Howie
(then Rhona Martin), she of the famous
Stone of Destiny in 2002. It was Howie
who led a British team to their only pre-
vious curling gold. Today marks exactly
20 years to the day since that achieve-
ment, so we can almost apply the cliché
of 20 years of hurt. It has certainly felt
like at least a decade’s pain for Muir-
head. “Twenty years has been long
enough,” Howie said.
Her investment in this team has been
considerable. All these curlers have
grown up knowing her and being
inspired by her. When Muirhead led
the team to their bronze medal in 2014,
Howie was her coach.
Here in Beijing, Howie had graduated
to the BBC commentary team. How-
ever, she said that it was “emotional”
watching her own piece of history being
repeated. “I’ve known Eve for so long,”
she said. “She’ll never stop fighting. Like
we did 20 years ago — you get given that
chance and my goodness you take it.”
And my goodness they did.eileen gu
The best women’s freestyle skier in the
world, by some distance, and that
doesn’t tell half the story. She won two
gold medals and a silver — and two of
those medals were claimed when the
pressure was on and she had to produce
something special with her third and
last run. What a competitor. But, also,
what an astonishing global citizen —
the girl is half-Chinese, half-American,
fluent in both of her nations’ languages,
and can talk the language of
international geopolitics too. All at
only 18 years old. Some launch for the
Olympics’ new commercial rocket.kirsty muir
The Aberdeen freestyle skier competed
with the kind of spirit that should make
her country proud — with a ripping all-
or-nothing courage. Team GB could
have done with a bit more of that. Only
17, she got a fifth and an eighth. One towatch, and one to enjoy — when she
has finished school.kamila valieva
The short programme by the 15-year-
old Russian figure skater, so steeped in
controversy, was mesmerising —
beauty and athleticism in near-perfect
unison, all laid down, fittingly, to whatRedemption, courage,
FINAL MEDAL TABLE
1 Norway 16 8 13 37
2 Germany 12 10 5 27
3 China 94215
4 United States 810725
5 Sweden 85518
6 Netherlands 85417
7 Austria 77418
8 Switzerland 72514
9 ROC 6121432
10 France 57214
11 Canada 481426
12 Japan 36918
13 Italy 27817
14 South Korea 2529
15 Slovenia 2327
16 Finland 2248
17 New Zealand 2103
18 Australia 1214
19 Great Britain 1 1 0 2
20 Hungary 1023G S B TotalOwen Slot assesses the
winners and losers from
an eventful fortnight
at the Beijing Games
Britain's winter peaks
Team GB’s top-five sports
G S B Total
Figure skating
Skeleton
Curling
Bobsleigh
Ice hockey1
2
3
4
55 3 7
3 1 5
3 2 1
1 1 3
1 0 115
9
6
5
2Team GB’s athletes by medal
G S B Total
Lizzy Yarnold,
SkeletonEve Muirhead,
Curling
Jane Torvill &
Christopher
Dean,
Figure skating
Madge Syers,
Figure skating12242 0 0
(2014,
2018)
1 0 1
(2022) (2014)
1 0 1
(1984) (1994)1 0 1
(1908*) (1908**)2222*Ladies’ single **PairBEST MOMENTS
Muirhead’s team
end years of hurt
with tears of joy
Sport Winter Olympics
Owen Slot
Chief Sports
Writer, BeijingMuirhead, the skip, delivers a stone for Britain, as Duff and Dodds watch on