The Winter Olympic curling match between Canada and Sweden was mired by controversy on Friday when tempers flared in a profanity-laden row in Cortina.
The Canadian team, skipped by Brad Jacobs, emerged victorious at the Cortina Curling Olympic Stadium with an 8-6 round-robin win, but not without first surviving a cheating scandal.
Sweden’s Oskar Eriksson repeatedly accused his opponent Marc Kennedy of cheating, alleging that the Canadian was double-touching the stones.
In curling, a double touch by the person delivering the stone, prior to the hog line where the stone must be released, is not considered a violation. However, if a touch occurs inside the hog line, then it incurs an infraction.
Kennedy did not take too kindly to the allegations and angrily confronted his rival in heated scenes uncharacteristic of the Winter Olympics.
‘I haven’t done it once,’ the Canadian shouted across the sheet amid his furious outburst that was captured on the SVT broadcast. ‘You can f*** off.’
The Winter Olympics curling match between Canada and Sweden became heated on Friday
Sweden’s Oskar Eriksson (right) accused his opponent Marc Kennedy (left) of cheating
Eriksson did not back down easily. In fact, the Swede doubled down on his accusations, claiming he would provide evidence of the breach.
‘I’ll show you a video after the game,’ Eriksson said. ‘I’ll show you a video where it’s two meters over the hog line.’
‘Come on, Oskar. Just f*** off,’ Kennedy fired back.
Sweden repeatedly complained about the alleged violations throughout the match but to no avail.
The match had to be paused after the conclusion of the second end as both teams appealed to the officials.
‘You saw it. You saw the touching, right?’ Eriksson asked the judge. ‘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.
Amid the Swede’s protestations, Canadian Ben Hebert interrupted with concerns of his own asking the official to keep a close eye on double-touching violations committed by Eriksson.
Kennedy releases a stone at the hog line – the point on the sheet where contact must cease
In one moment, Kennedy appeared to still be making contact when the stone hit the line
The match continued as a tense affair with both sides attempting to needle one another, before Eriksson’s frustrations boiled over once again.
During the sixth end, he claimed to the judge that Kennedy double-touched a stone. In footage from the match, Kennedy could be seen releasing his stone towards the hog line. As he did so, he extended a finger that appeared to make contact with the stone again. It seemed that Kennedy’s finger was still touching the stone when it hit the edge of the line, where contact must cease.
While the clip of the moment went viral amid Eriksson’s accusations, the judge said that he could not tell for certain whether Kennedy had done anything wrong. No infractions were issued.
World Curling said in a statement that it reviewed the match and found no missed violations.
World Curling’s governing rules state: ‘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.
‘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.’
There are further rules that dictate when the stones can be touched before they reach the hog line. In those instances, if a moving stone is touched by its own releaser a second time before it reaches that line, there is no violation.
However, once a stone touches the hog line, any additional contact by the releasing team would incur an infraction.
Eriksson, pictured in action during Friday’s round-robin match, repeatedly complained
Canada ultimately emerged with an 8-6 win. Kennedy’s teammate Ben Hebert is pictured
In that instance, the opposing team has the choice to remove the touched stone from play and replace an affected stones to their original positions, or to place all stones where they reasonably considers the stones would have come to rest had the moving stone not been touched.
World Curling introduced electronic handles on the stones at these Games, which flash red if players are still making contact with the stone beyond the hog line.
Despite the controversy, Canada ultimately prevailed, clinching their third victory of the round robin. Meanwhile, Sweden, the defending Olympic champion, fell to 0-3.
Following the match, Kennedy, who won gold at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics and bronze at the 2022 Beijing Olympics, told CBC: ‘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.’
The mid-match row wasn’t the first time that the Games have been rocked by a cheating scandal.
French judge Jezabel Dabouis sparked fury this week after allegations she ‘rigged’ her votes to help her country to Winter Olympics gold in ice dance.
French ice dancing couple Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron stunned the world when they came out victorious for France at the Milan-Cortina Games on Wednesday.
Judge Dabouis favored Beaudry and Cizeron by nearly eight points over the three-time world champions in the free dance, a margin so large that if her score was removed from the equation, Americans Madison Chock and Evan Bates would have won gold.
Madison Chock and Evan Bates were left heartbroken after missing out on Olympic gold
The voting sparked accusations of ‘rigging’ with thousands of furious fans calling for the sport’s authorities to investigate.
In the past 24 hours, more than 14,000 fans have signed a Change.org petition calling for the IOC and International Skating Union to intervene and launch a probe into the voting process, but so far nothing has been forthcoming.
In fact, the ISU has opted to stand by her, issuing its first statement late on Thursday.
‘It is normal for there to be a range of scores given by different judges in any panel and a number of mechanisms are used to mitigate these variations,’ it read, adding it has ‘full confidence in the scores given and remains completely committed to fairness.’
Yet, Chock and Bates have since spoken to CBS News about the dubious judging after allegations the competition was ‘rigged’ against them.
