Canada’s men’s curling team did not take kindly to accusations it cheated during its 8-6 round-robin win over Sweden on Friday. Tempers flared, chests were puffed and expletives flew.
“You can f— off,” Canadian Marc Kennedy said to his opponent as the game drew to a close in a heated scene uncommon at the Milan Cortina Olympics. A few more iterations of that swear word followed.
Kennedy’s blow-up came after Sweden repeatedly accused him of breaking the rules without punishment. The Swedes commented to him about the alleged infractions, which Kennedy fervently denied.
“You haven’t done it once?” asked Sweden’s Oskar Eriksson.
“I haven’t done it once. Don’t chirp at me,” Kennedy insisted.
“I can show you video after the game,” Eriksson shot back.
At issue was whether the Canadians made illegal releases by touching the stone after releasing it. Sweden complained about alleged double touches throughout the match to no avail, even pausing play entirely early on to discuss the matter with officials.
The match first came to a pause after the second stage, known in curling as an “end.” Sweden complained to officials that the Canadians were taking shots that shouldn’t count, and Canada responded with denials and matching accusations of its own.
“You saw it. You saw the touching, right?” Eriksson said to the judge during the first complaint shown on the broadcast. “So is he allowed to do it or not? That’s the question.”
“There’s no way you can do that,” Swedish teammate Niklas Edin muttered.
It wasn’t clear what the umpire said to Sweden in response, but while the Swedes were still speaking to the judge about their concerns, Canadian Ben Hebert interrupted to ask the same judge to watch out for double touches by Eriksson himself.
Athletes on both teams appeared to needle each other throughout the match, trading smirks and glares.
Eriksson expressed frustration to a different judge during the sixth end. As Kennedy let his stone go, he extended a finger that appeared to make contact with the stone a second time, and it looked like he was still touching it by the time it hit the edge of the line where contact must stop. Clips of the shot quickly drew online allegations of cheating and poor sportsmanship.
The judge, however, told Eriksson he could not tell for certain whether Kennedy had done anything wrong.
“I saw his finger motion, but I cannot say if he really touched it or not,” he said. Eriksson continued to make his case that it needed to be “clear and obvious” that the shot was clean for it to count. In response, the judge smiled uncomfortably but did not issue an infraction.
Oskar Eriksson was part of the Swedish men’s team that won gold in Beijing four years ago. He took home a bronze medal in mixed doubles during those Games. His men’s teams also won silver in PyeongChang and bronze in Sochi. (Odd Andersen / AFP via Getty Images)
There are multiple rules involved here.
The first issue is how legal shots are released. Curlers can only use the handle of the stone when releasing it, not the granite base. At the Olympics, stone handles have sensors known as “hog eyes” to determine whether a handle was tapped after the stone reached the bright green hog (or tee) line. However, there is no sensor inside the rock itself, so any late contact with the granite does not trigger a red flash. That means a curler could get away with manipulating the trajectory if there is no intervention by an umpire or line judge. Eriksson argued that’s what Kennedy intentionally did.
“A stone must be clearly released from the hand before it reaches the hog line at the delivery end. If the player fails to do so, the stone is immediately removed from play by the delivering team,” according to World Curling’s governing rules. “If a hog line violation stone is not immediately removed and strikes another stone, the delivered stone must be removed from play by the delivering team, and any displaced stones are replaced, by the nonoffending team, to their positions prior to the violation taking place.”
That policy applies to late releases where the stone doesn’t leave the shooter’s hand before the line, but World Curling lays out additional policies for when a team can touch stones that are released in time but are affected post-release. If a moving stone is touched by its own releaser a second time before it reaches that line, there is no violation, but once it touches the hog line, any additional contact by the shooter puts the stone’s fate in their opponent’s hands.
At that point, the other team has three options. It can “burn” the double-touched stone and return any stones hit by the shot to their previous locations, or it can allow the shot to count and maintain the new status quo it created. A third route is to “place all stones where (the non-offending team) reasonably considers the stones would have come to rest had the moving stone not been touched.”
The game went on. Canada won. Controversy swirled, somewhat overshadowing a clinical performance by Canada’s Brad Jacobs. Kennedy, who won gold at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics and bronze at the 2022 Beijing Olympics, rejected it all in postgame comments reported by CBC reporter Devin Heroux.
“There’s hog line devices on there. I don’t know. And he’s still accusing us of cheating. I didn’t like it. So I told him where to stick it,” Kennedy said. “Because we’re the wrong team to do that to. So, I don’t care.”
Sweden came into Milan Cortina as the defending gold medalist but has gotten off to a poor start. The Swedes lost to Canada after dropping games to Britain and Italy. Kennedy said as much, further dismissing Eriksson’s complaints.
“He might have been upset that he was losing,” Kennedy said. “He might be upset that they’re 0-2, grasping for straws. I just told him again. I said I have a ton of respect for him as a player. … I don’t really know what he’s trying to get out of it. And yeah, onward. But I’m not going to stand there and take cheating lightly.”
During his own postgame news conference, Eriksson shifted blame to unprepared officiators.
“We told the officials. They came out, and they misread the rules, sadly,” he said. “Because they thought double-touching any part of the rock is OK. And then they found out that was wrong. You can only touch the electronic part of the handle.”
World Curling said in a statement that it reviewed the match and found no missed violations.
“We’re all super-good friends out there,” Edin said during his postgame news conference. “We’ve known them for 20 years. And (rule violations) happened many times before, so it’s just sad that it gets to heated discussions on the ice instead of just curling, according to the rulebooks, but it’s what it is.”
The Canadian men’s team beat the U.S. earlier in the day, with the victory against Sweden putting its record at 3-0.
Canada will next face undefeated Switzerland on Saturday. Sweden, which won gold over the U.S. in mixed doubles curling, will take on 0-3 China at the same time, one sheet away.