Canada’s Homan beats Sweden’s Hasselborg at Games

CORTINA D’AMPEZZO – Sweden’s Anna Hasselborg qualified for the playoffs at the Winter Olympics on Tuesday despite falling to Canada.

Rachel Homan took a big step toward joining her with an 8-6 victory at Cortina Curling Olympic Stadium.

Homan made an end-changing triple-takeout in the eighth and took advantage of a Sweden miss in the ninth to improve to 4-3. Canada iced it with a deuce in the 10th end to hand Sweden (6-1) its first defeat of the competition.

“You never know what game is going to matter in the round robin,” said Canada coach Heather Nedohin. “So yeah, they’re all must-wins.”

A loss to Sweden would have been a major hit for Canada’s playoff hopes. Instead, Homan’s Ottawa-based rink is tied for fourth place with two games to play.

Homan, Tracy Fleury, Emma Miskew and Sarah Wilkes have reeled off three straight wins after a 1-3 start and a weekend loaded with distractions. The top four teams in the 10-field cut will advance to the semifinals on Friday afternoon.

“We feel like we’re battling and we’re resilient,” Miskew said. “We are trying to make sure that we continue to put as much pressure on as we can.”

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Homan was scheduled to play Stefania Constantini of host Italy on Wednesday ahead of her round-robin finale against South Korea’s Eunji Gim on Thursday. The latter matchup could determine the final playoff entry.

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“Every game here is huge for us,” Homan said. “We have to keep playing our game and keep staying within ourselves.”

Switzerland’s Silvana Tirinzoni beat South Korea 7-5 on Tuesday and American Tabitha Peterson dumped Denmark’s Madeleine Dupont 10-3. That left the U.S. and Switzerland tied in second place behind Sweden at 5-2.

The Canada-Sweden game came after a tense matchup between the countries in the men’s draw on Friday night. Vice-skips Marc Kennedy and Oskar Eriksson had a profanity-laced exchange about ‘double-touching’ stones that went viral.

Homan got involved Saturday after World Curling assigned umpires to monitor the hog line area where stones are released. An umpire pulled Homan’s first stone in a loss to Switzerland that night due to double-touching.

It’s illegal to touch the granite portion of the rock after the handle is released. Homan denied there was contact and called the decision to remove the stone “absurd.”

Great Britain’s Bobby Lammie had a stone pulled Sunday for double-touching and World Curling reversed course for the next session, reverting back to its original umpire setup.

Temperatures were much lower for the Canada-Sweden matchup between veteran women’s teams that know each other well.

Sweden took its first lead in the fifth end after Homan missed a double-takeout and knocked her own stone out of the house. Hasselborg made a hit to score three points for a 4-3 advantage.

After exchanging singles, Homan seemed uncertain about trying a triple-takeout in the eighth end. Miskew talked her into it and the skip delivered with a powerful hit that cleared all three Swedish stones and left Canada sitting two.

“Having that high-weight ability to make rocks – many rocks – move is exceptional,” Nedohin said.

Canada shot 83 per cent overall while Sweden was at 73 per cent.

Hasselborg had a chance for a deuce in the ninth end but settled for a single when her rock rolled out. That gave Canada hammer coming home in a tie game and Homan made a nose hit for the deuce.

“We just try to take advantage whenever we can of getting any sort of break,” Miskew said.

Canada hasn’t won Olympic women’s team gold since Jennifer Jones was victorious at the 2014 Games in Sochi, Russia.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 17, 2026.