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Britain Takes Gold; U.S. Team Swept Aside

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Four women from Scotland won an Olympic gold medal here Thursday for what normally would be considered inappropriate behavior--throwing rocks in the house.

Skip Rhona Martin, on the last shot of the championship game, took a Swiss stone out of the scoring house, giving Britain a 4-3 victory in women’s curling at the Ice Sheet at Ogden.

Thus, in a tournament that Canada, the modern-day power, couldn’t win, the title went to a team from the country where the sport was born in the 1600s. Canada won the bronze medal, beating a surprising United States team, 9-5.

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Fans rose, cheering as Martin’s stone crawled to the Swiss stone, then ever-so-gently bumped it away, leaving the Scottish rock to take the point.

Fans waved Scottish flags as sweepers Debbie Knox, Fiona McDonald and Janice Rankin dropped their brooms and began the celebration.

“They jumped in the air,” Martin said. “I couldn’t even see the stone, so I figured it must have been good.”

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It was the second dramatic victory in two days for the Scots. Martin’s final shot in Wednesday’s semifinal had beaten Canada, 6-5.

“They had a great shot and last stone,” Swiss skip Luzia Ebnoether said of Martin’s game winner.

In finishing fourth, the U.S. improved on its previous Olympic showing, a tie for fifth at Nagano in 1998, which left the Americans with mixed emotions.

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“I’m very proud,” said skip Kari Erickson. “We got fourth place. Fourth place in the Olympics is very good ... but we would have liked to have a medal.”

Added Ann Swisshelm, the vice skip, “This team has a motto and it comes from a movie [‘A League of Their Own’], ‘There’s no crying in curling.’ I will admit that today is about as close as I’ve ever come to crying in curling. But it was a great game. We had a great Olympics.”

The Canadians scored twice in the first end and never looked back, making the U.S. play more defense than planned.

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“We wanted to go after them,” Erickson said. “They’re a good team and we wanted to make them shoot tough shots.”

That came as no surprise to the Canadians.

“They pretty much did what they did all week,” skip Kelley Law said. “We were expecting the game they played against us. We can play that finesse game so we wanted to put some pressure on them and we did that.”

Canada pretty much put it out of reach in the fifth end, when Erickson tried to angle a take-out shot around a three-stone guard and just missed. Law then set another guard for the scoring stone and Erickson, with the last shot of the end, hit the guard, giving Canada another point and a 5-2 lead.

Erickson scored with two shots in the eighth, making it 7-5 in the eighth, but Canada scored again in the ninth, then, with the last shot in the 10th, played strictly defense and still scored again.

“We’re really disappointed, but what can we do about it now?” Swisshelm said. “We can’t get back any rocks we’ve already thrown.”

Erickson ruefully agreed. “We had opportunities to score a few points and that didn’t happen in every end,” she said.

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Even making the bronze-medal game, however, was encouraging to the Americans, who were 2-3 in round-robin play before winning four in succession to make the semifinals.

Canada had hoped for better than bronze.

“Our expectations were high, but it doesn’t always turn out that way,” Law said.

“[After losing to Britain on Wednesday] we were hoping that we would wake up and it would be a nightmare. But we woke up and it was Thursday morning, the sun was shining and so we played our best....

“It’s an Olympic medal we won today, not a consolation prize.”

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