Well, this is awkward. By virtue of her 8-1 performance in the Canadian Olympic trials, Team Fleury moves to #1 in the doubletakeout.com women’s ratings. But that one loss was in the finals to Jennifer Jones, who will represent Canada in the Olympics. Which means the best team in the world will not be at the Olympics.
This does raise a question regarding the fairness of the trials format. Fleury went undefeated in round-robin play, beating the field by three games. Then, mainly for TV purposes, she had to win a one-off game against Jones. According to my ratings, Fleury has about a 65% chance to beat Jones in a single game. You might bump that up a bit knowing the Fleury was starting with hammer and that at the end of an event there are fewer unknowns with the ice, something that would tend to benefit an underdog. So maybe Fleury had something like a 75% chance to win.
Still, it doesn’t seem terribly fair for the best team in the world, that also was the best team in the round-robin, to have to risk a one-in-four chance to not be the Olympic representative.
I haven’t really heard any good rationalizations of how this could be fair other than winning a single final game proves you can win under pressure. But that’s not a very good argument. Any team as good as Fleury (or Homan or Einarson or Jones) has had to win a whole bunch of pressure games their whole lives. Fleury’s loss doesn’t implicate her ability to handle pressure. It’s more an example of why the best team in the world is 38-6 this season and not 44-0. Nobody is perfect and perfection was required of Fleury.
That said, a game like that is entertaining as hell. And if you want to get more eyeballs on the sport and more of those second-level teams sticking with the game into their 30’s and 40’s, seeing Jones pull off the upset was exactly what you want.
If you wanted total fairness, you’d have a season-long points system, or use the world rankings in some way to pick the best team. Silvana Tirinzoni didn’t have to play any qualification games to represent Switzerland at the Olympics. Her team is so obviously the best in the country, that she was awarded the spot in the Olympics. The same is true for Eve Muirhead, whose team is not technically in the Olympics yet but will be once Team Great Britain obliterates that field at the Olympic Qualification Event in a couple weeks.
While that approach is more fair it’s also far less entertaining. And when it comes to balancing fairness and entertainment, I lean heavily for Team Entertainment in my sports watching. If sports aren’t entertaining, there isn’t much need to watch.
You could go for some kind of middle ground. Both the U.S. men’s and women’s trials faced a similar quandary as the Canadian women. Team Shuster and Team Peterson dominated round-robin play, nay, a double round-robin, losing just one game each and beating the field by two games. But the format required a playoff between the top two teams. But in this case the playoff was a best-of-three. Not really fair, but more fair. You could argue that if either team lost twice to the second-best team then it would be hard to argue they were obviously the best team that week in the way the Fleury can.
Jones’ win will make the Olympics a bit more wide open. Fleury would been the favorite in Beijing, but it’s safe to say that Jones won’t be. It will probably be Hasselborg, but the main point is that it will be a relatively wide open event among the top six or seven teams.
On the men’s side, the best team did win the Canadian trials as Team Gushue continued its rampage on the curling world. Gushue lost once in pool play, to Jason Gunnlaugson, but otherwise it was another dominant week. Gushue actually moved to #1 in the world, although due to a clerical error – I had not included Team Mouat’s results from the Boost National a month ago – Gushue actually should have been #1 for the past four weeks.
This means that Canadian teams occupy the top spots on the men’s and women’s rankings for the first time since November 11, 2019, when teams Koe and Einarson were atop the ratings.
The men’s competition at the Olympics will be decidely less wide open than the women. Between Gushue and Bruce Mouat, whose team won the European Championships without a loss, there will be two dominant forces at the Olympics that weren’t there four years ago. Team Shuster might actually be a little better than they were then and yet have less of a chance at gold.
This week, we find out where the last three berths in the Olympics go as nine men’s and women’s teams play in the Olympic Qualification Event in the Netherlands. I haven’t bothered to compute odds for this event because the format is a little non-traditional. The top team from the round-robin gets an Olympic berth and then the second, third and fourth-ranked teams will play a page playoff for the other two bids.
On the men’s side, the top rated teams are Italy (14th), Japan (16th), and Norway (18th). Then there’s a drop to the next group of challengers which includes the Czech Republic (37th) and Germany (38th).
On the women’s side, Great Britain (5th), South Korea (8th), and Japan (9th) are the top three. The drop off from that group is extreme. The only viable challenger is Germany’s Team Jentsch (24th) who took bronze at the European Championships last week. After that’s you have to go all the way to 61st to find the next highest-ranked contender, Turkey’s Team Yildiz.
