Success at the 2010 Men's Worlds

Congratulations to Kevin Koe of Canada for winning the gold at the 2010 Men's World Curling Championship. The victories of their team, especially in the play-offs, showed a dominating ability that was impressive.

Almost as impressive was the performance of the Norwegian team, who led after the round robin. This team was clearly the other top team of the tournament.

And now, all modesty aside, congratulations to me for my marvelous rebound after completely missing on my predictions at the women's worlds.

• For the men's worlds, I predicted Koe to win. I had little confidence in the prediction, and this view was apparently correct, given that the team from Canada lost two games in the round robin, finishing second overall, only to dominate Norway during the playoffs.
• I also predicted Norway to be at or near the top, as indeed they were. The pants didn't seem to distract them, nor did the sudden departure of their regular skip, Thomas Ulsrud. Their performance was impressive.
• And, just to round out the trifecta, I mentioned the Scottish team third, which is where they finished. They looked good at times, but quite frankly they didn't seem to be in the same league with Norway and Canada.
• I also predicted that Andy Kapp from Germany would play the role of spoiler but wouldn't be a contender for a medal, and that, too, is precisely what happened. Kapp handed Canada one of its defeats but did not qualify for the playoffs.

My one incorrect prediction was that Sweden might be a dark horse. Well they were so dark nobody knew they were there, so to speak. Besides, I only said "might".

Unfortunately, I was traveling on the train yesterday during the gold medal game. I thought I might be able to use my iPhone to tether my laptop to watch the game on TSN.ca, but, no, of course not. Because TSN was showing the game on their number one channel, they were not showing it on a webcast. I also tried p2peu, etc., but none of those types of sites seemed to be carrying the game.

As Ms. Eclectic said, maybe what the world of curling needs is for the US teams to win some more medals to spark more interest there. Then maybe the sport will get more international coverage beyond just the famous curling calendars.