{"id":358,"date":"2026-04-12T02:20:32","date_gmt":"2026-04-12T02:20:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/358\/"},"modified":"2026-04-12T02:20:32","modified_gmt":"2026-04-12T02:20:32","slug":"curling-beef-ongoing-months-after-olympics-canadian-skip-reportedly-says-swedish-team-is-nothing-to-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/358\/","title":{"rendered":"Curling beef ongoing months after Olympics; Canadian skip reportedly says Swedish team is ‘nothing to me’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Curling has long been regarded as a gentleman\u2019s sport. But in the Milan Cortina Olympics<\/a>, its ice was the breeding ground for a fiery exchange that breathed life into an international rivalry<\/a> that\u2019s apparently still kicking two months later.<\/p>\n

Back in February, Swedish third Oskar Eriksson levied a serious cheating allegation against Canadian third Marc Kennedy, whom Eriksson accused of double-touching stones with his finger beyond the hog line and on the granite part of the rock.<\/p>\n

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Things boiled over after the ninth end of an 8-6 Canada victory in round-robin action of the men\u2019s competition, for which the Canadians eventually won gold.<\/p>\n

Kennedy snapped at Eriksson with a profanity-laced retort in a heated back-and-forth that went viral during this year\u2019s Games. What followed was a temporary adjustment by World Curling<\/a> that called for two umpires to move between the sheets, cycling through to watch hog lines up close while monitoring for infractions. That led to complaints, as reported by the Associated Press at the time<\/a>, and World Curling reportedly swiftly eased back on its play surveillance.<\/p>\n

Curling is a well-mannered sport, in which its participants are trusted to officiate themselves to a certain extent, with the spirit of the game in mind. Some curlers weren\u2019t offended by Canada\u2019s double-touching. Eriksson clearly was, and he still believes it makes a significant impact on matches.<\/p>\n

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\u201cA lot of people have been talking about, like, \u2018You can\u2019t do anything with a finger on a 20-kilo granite rock,’\u201d Eriksson said Thursday night, according to The Athletic<\/a>, in Toronto at Rock League, the world\u2019s first professional curling league.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut when it\u2019s moving, it\u2019s quite easy to give it a small push, and you can actually change the angle quite a bit more than the speed. So [Swedish media] wanted to see how big of a difference you can make with just a small touch with the finger.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eriksson was alluding to a video<\/a> recently circulated by Swedish media outlet SVT that shows him demonstrating and explaining how a double-touch violation can, in his eyes, be unfairly used as a corrective measure to influence the path of a stone on the ice upon a thrower\u2019s initial release.<\/p>\n

By rule, as clarified mid-Olympics by World Curling on Feb. 14<\/a>, players can retouch the handle of a stone as many times as they want prior to the hog line \u2014 the boundary before which the thrower must release the stone for it to be considered in play \u2014 but touching the handle after the hog line isn\u2019t allowed and should result in the stone being removed from play. A stone should also be removed from play if a player touches the granite of the stone during forward motion, rather than the handle.<\/p>\n

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World Curling introduced electronic handles on the stones at this year’s Games. Triggered by a touch sensor, as well as a magnetic strip in the ice, they were designed to flash red if players were still touching the handle after the hog line.<\/p>\n

Touching the granite beyond the hog line, though, wouldn\u2019t activate that mechanism.<\/p>\n

Brad Jacobs, the Canadian skip on Kennedy\u2019s team that won Olympic gold, is frustrated, too, but that frustration is directed toward the Swedes.<\/p>\n

\u201cSomething needs to happen here,\u201d Jacobs said this week, per The Athletic<\/a>. \u201cThere needs to be accountability. Everything that happened at the Olympics with this controversy was not handled properly, starting from the top down.\u201d<\/p>\n

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As for the Swedish team specifically, Jacobs reportedly told The Athletic, \u201cThey\u2019re nothing to me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s quite simple, I act like they don\u2019t exist. I\u2019m very unhappy with all of their actions and things they\u2019ve done recently.\u201d<\/p>\n

That said, while Canada was at the top of the podium in this year\u2019s Games, Sweden won gold in the World Curling Championship. Team Edin, which is skipped by Niklas Edin and also includes Eriksson among the quartet, defeated a Canadian squad skipped by Matt Dunstone in the final.<\/p>\n

Before that, Team Dunstone beat Team Jacobs in the the Canadian national championship, denying Team Jacobs a spot in the world championships.<\/p>\n

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The rivalry could be a good thing for curling. Some bad blood can go a long way in terms of a sport\u2019s popularity.<\/p>\n

Especially one like curling that\u2019s struggled to stay in the zeitgeist outside the Olympic window.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Curling has long been regarded as a gentleman\u2019s sport. But in the Milan Cortina Olympics, its ice was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":359,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[257,17,258,255,256,254,253],"class_list":["post-358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-canada","tag-brad-jacobs","tag-canada","tag-hog-line","tag-marc-kennedy","tag-olympic-games","tag-oskar-eriksson","tag-world-curling"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=358"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/359"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}