BEIJING If the pressure is building on Canada’s Olympic curlers, you wouldn’t know it talking to Jennifer Jones.
“I don’t feel pressure. I feel privilege,” Jones, the skip of the national women’s team at these Games, was saying this week. “How lucky we are to put this jacket on and have your name above the Maple Leaf. It truly is the biggest privilege you can ever have, and it’s an honour. So you wear it with a lot of pride.”
If a nation of sports psychologists is nodding in affirmation, there’s a lot to be said for the sentiment. In a nation of domestic depth, teams need to run a gauntlet just to get the chance to represent Canada. And it’s certainly not on Jones that her compatriots were shut out of the men’s and women’s medals at the 2018 Olympics, not to mention the 2021 worlds, or that John Morris and Rachel Homan missed the playoffs in mixed doubles this week.
If Jones projects an outward confidence to match her patriotism, you can certainly understand why. The last time she and her Winnipeg-based rink de ella were at an Olympics, they came home with the gold medal. That’d be 2014 in Sochi, from which she and her teammates Kaitlyn Lawes, Jocelyn Peterman and Dawn McEwen still harbor plenty of great memories.
“Just being at the Olympics, wearing Canada clothes everywhere you go. You got to wear sweat pants to TV interviews. And just being a part of this big Team Canada, ”said Jones, rhyming off her recollections of her. “Everywhere you go, there’s Olympic rings. It’s like you’re living this fairy-tale life. All of a sudden, it’s come true. And I feel like it’s come true all over again.”
Lawes, a two-time Olympic gold medalist who won mixed doubles alongside Morris in Pyeongchang four years ago, was similarly effusive about the five-ringed experience.
“One thing about the Olympics – I feel like it’s the happiest place on earth,” she said. “Like Disneyland for athletes. So we’re really enjoying everything so far.”
Indeed, Beijing’s anti-COVID closed-loop system – which has kept families at home and shuttered traditional Olympic perks like Canada House – hasn’t stopped the women’s curlers from taking in a variety of sports since they arrived a few days back. They’ve already been to short-track and long-track speedskating and women’s hockey. They’ve taken in some mixed doubles curling.
“Obviously it would be nice to have our families here and have Canada House and all of that. But we’ve decorated our little apartment to be our own Canada House. So it’s all good,” Jones said. “I think what the last two years has taught us is that you have to make the best of every small little moment you have in your life right now, and we’re making the best of this. We’re not feeling sorry for ourselves one bit. This is absolutely phenomenal. And we’re just super-grateful for every opportunity that we’ve had. I feel like the smile has not come off my face since we’ve landed, and I don’t think it will.”
As a consummate competitor, Jones will no doubt also find time to apply her steely game face. And she and her teammates will need their best de ella against the likes of defending gold medalist Anna Hasselborg of Sweden and defending world champion Silvana Tirinzoni of Switzerland. But if pressure is a privilege, prognosis is a no-go for Jones.
“We can guarantee to Canada that we’re going to try our very best,” Jones said. “We’re never going to give up. We can’t guarantee an outcome, but we can guarantee that the effort’s going to be one thousand per cent.”
