Curling season is here — will Canada finally end its major-title drought?
Canada's talent runs deep, but it hasn't won a big championship since 2018
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Though the pros have been competing in smaller bonspiels for a couple of months now, the 2023-24 curling season really gets going this week with the first stop on the Grand Slam circuit — the Tour Challenge in Niagara Falls, Ont.
The Grand Slam of Curling is a series of tournaments for the world's best men's and women's teams, with more than $2 million in total prize money up for grabs this season across five events. The tour culminates with the Players' Championship in Toronto in April, reserved for the top 12 men's and women's rinks. The Champions Cup, which previously closed the Grand Slam slate, was dropped from the schedule for this season.
The Tour Challenge is the largest Slam, with 64 teams (32 women's, 32 men's) competing for a combined $400,000 in prize money. There are two separate 16-team tournaments for each gender: Tier 1 is for the best teams and Tier 2 for less-established squads.
The top skips in the Tier 1 women's event include Canadians Kerri Einarson, who won her record-tying fourth consecutive Scotties Tournament of Hearts title last season; Jennifer Jones, owner of a record-tying six Scotties crowns along with a pair of world titles and an Olympic gold; and Rachel Homan, a three-time Scotties winner and a former world champ. The international stars include Switzerland's Silvana Tirinzoni, who captured her fourth straight world championship last season; and Sweden's Anna Hasselborg, a 2018 Olympic women's gold medallist.
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The Tier 1 men's skips include Canadians Brad Gushue, who captured his record fifth Brier champions last season and has also won Olympic and world titles; Kevin Koe, a four-time Brier winner and two-time world champ; and Brendan Bottcher, who has medalled at six straight Briers, including a title win in 2021. The internationals are led by Sweden's Nik Edin, who won Olympic gold in 2022 and owns six world titles; and Scotland's Bruce Mouat, whose world-championship victory last season halted a run of four straight by Edin.
While the Grand Slams assemble the most competitive fields, most Canadian curling fans still consider the tradition-steeped Brier and Tournament of Hearts to be the pinnacle of the season. The national championship swing starts in February with the Scotties in Calgary, followed by the Brier in early March in Regina. Sydney, N.S., hosts the women's world championship later that month before the men head to Switzerland for their worlds starting March 30. The Canadian mixed doubles championship in Fredericton, N.B., in mid-March will decide which pair gets to go to the worlds in Sweden in late April.
As this week's Grand Slam opener begins paving the way for those big national and international championships, the biggest question in the sport remains: when will Canada finally win another major title?
Though its early-adopter advantage has shrunk considerably in recent years, Canada still produces most of the world's elite curlers. No other country can rival its depth. And yet, no Canadian team has captured an Olympic or major world title since 2018, when Jennifer Jones skipped her rink to gold at the women's world championship and John Morris and Kaitlyn Lawes won the inaugural Olympic mixed doubles tournament. Canada has won the four-person world mixed curling championship three straight times (and is currently trying to make it four), but that's a much less-heralded event that doesn't draw elite players.
The major drought seemed like it would end last season, when Canada sent an historically great skip to each of the big three world championships. But Einarson failed, for the fourth straight time, to reach the final at the women's worlds and wound up with another bronze; Gushue lost the men's world title game in Ottawa to Mouat; and Jones and her husband, Brent Laing, lost in the semifinals at the mixed doubles worlds before dropping the bronze game to Norway. Jones and Laing's semifinal defeat extended one of the most surprising losing streaks in sports: Canada has never won the mixed doubles world championship, going 0-for-15 since its inception in 2008.
Canada's major title drought will reach six years when the calendar flips to 2024 in a few months. And ending it is seemingly getting tougher with each passing year. As noted by The Canadian Press' Gregory Strong, only 12 of the 32 Tier 1 entries at the Tour Challenge are Canadian, and nine different countries are represented in each of the 16-team men's and women's draws.
"International depth is actually getting stronger as opposed to the other way around," curling commentator Mike Harris explained to Strong. "But the good news is that our top five or six teams are right there." Read more about the new season and the continued globalization of curling here.
