Sweden’s Men Win Curling Gold & More News Here

Four years in the past, the Swedish males’s curling workforce watched as a workforce of Americans exulted in successful their nation’s first curling gold. It was a bitter upset they didn’t neglect.

Eight years after successful a bronze medal and 4 years after settling for silver, Sweden on Saturday lastly has its first curling gold.

“It feels so crazy,” the Sweden skip Niklas Edin advised reporters. “I almost had to ask someone before I came here, ‘We have won, right?’”

Sweden’s victory got here after a good match in opposition to Britain, which additionally was searching for its first gold medal in curling for the reason that sport made its official return to the Games in 1998. Britain had received the primary curling gold awarded, on the 1924 Games in Chamonix, France, earlier than the game with brooms and heavy, sliding stones promptly disappeared from the Olympic program for 74 years.

The last rating was 5-4, a victory sealed by regular play by Sweden and one last daring try by Britain that simply missed its mark.

Britain’s silver was its first medal of any variety on the Beijing Games. Canada received the bronze on Friday, defeating the United States.

Sweden’s win was significantly gratifying for Edin, top-of-the-line curlers on this planet. At 36, he had pressed on by means of a historical past of accidents to pursue one other journey to the Games, one other probability for gold. He knew, too, that he was working out of time.

“I guess it puts a lot of extra pressure on you, because you don’t get too many chances at these,” he stated in an interview in January.

Edin has dozens of plaques and trophies piled up in his residence in Karlstad, Sweden, however retains his two Olympic medals in a glass cupboard. Now, after including the gold he has chased for greater than a decade, he has a whole set.

“God, it’s nice,” he advised reporters after the match. “It’s obviously been an incredibly long journey with pretty disappointing defeats.”

That the gold got here after an in depth match, Edin stated, appeared consistent with the Olympic match.

“Very tight games and a lot of emotions out there,” he stated. “We felt that we played good enough and that we’re worthy champions but it still felt completely insane and when it actually happens it is hard to understand.”

Britain’s ladies’s curling workforce faces Japan within the gold medal sport on Sunday.