SOCHI, February 17 (R-Sport) – Tasked at their home Winter Games with winning a first Olympic medal, Russia’s women’s curling squad fell short of the playoffs because they simply crumbled under the pressure, team captain Anna Sidorova said Monday.
As European champion in 2012 and with former European champion Thomas Lips as coach, Russia’s women had been expected to be in the fight for medals.
Instead, Sidorova’s team sits ninth out of 10 teams in the round robin following Monday’s 9-6 loss to Britain, the Russians’ last game of the round.
“Of course it isn’t what we were counting on, not what we could have displayed,” said Sidorova.
Statistically, the Russians were among the most accurate teams in the tournament, but fell apart when it mattered most, Sidorova said.
“The most painful thing right now is to look at the shot-making percentages and to see that we’re behind Canada in second place, better than all the others,” she said. “But our mistakes happened at the moment when they shouldn’t have done.”
The Britain-Russia game took place in what was, for curling, an unusually raucous atmosphere at the Ice Cube Curling Center in Sochi’s Olympic Park.
“I actually couldn't hear myself think,” British skip Eve Muirhead said. “I was just hoping there wasn't a really important line call where the sweepers would have to hear me scream, because there's absolutely no way they would have heard me."
British deputy captain Anna Sloan was enthused.
“Any crowd that curling gets is great. It's not the biggest sport in the world, so just to get curling on the radar really is just great wherever you are," Sloan said.
Canada leads the round robin with a perfect 8-0 record and one game to play, with Sweden second on 6-2 and Britain third on 5-3, followed by three teams on 4-4 records.
The top four teams go through to the quarterfinals, with tiebreak games between any team tied for fourth place.
Corrects paragraph 2 to reflect that Lips was European title, not world champion.
