BBC Sport introduces GB's professional wheelchair curlers

The BBC sent a reporter to Stirling to watch Team GB prepare for the Paralympics. As he mentions, curling is the winter Olympic sport that captures the attention of the British public, and after the struggles of the GB Olympic teams, the pressure will be on the McCreadie rink, described as professional wheelchair curlers.

In the video you can see them delivering from in front of the hack as opposed to near the hogline. WCF rules say that the stone at delivery played from between the hack and the top of the rings, must touch the centre line. Stones played between the top of the rings and the hogline can be up to (approx.) 6 inches from centre, the outer edge of the stone within 18 inches of the centre line.

GB's McCreadie "quietly confident of gold"

Jim Sellar, Angie Malone, Michael McCreadie, Aileen Nielsen, Tom Killin
[photo - Martin Shields - Evening Times]

Team Great Britain skip Michael McCreadie told reporters assembled at the team send off celebration at their teams home ice at Braehead: said, “We’re quietly confident of bringing home the gold medals.”

Bob Cowan reports Michael saying: "If we play at our best we will be a real handful for any country in the world .... The GB Paralympic teams work just as hard all year round and prepare for our winter games just as much as the competitors who are presently out in Vancouver for the Winter Olympics.”

You can read the rest of Bob's report HERE.

Also a report from the Paisley Express.

Though the GB team, all Scots, have as much experience and as many medals as any team in the world, for the past two years they've been undertaking what Tom Pendreigh their coach calls a "skill acquisition project." This has included throwing from the top of the rings rather than the near hogline.

Pendreigh expressed surprise when I contacted him last week at the skepticism his project has provoked from those outside his program. He's certain of its advantages and feels his team has overcome "expected and managed" performance dips in the run up to the Paralympics.

GB plays Canada in the first draw, and a good result will give McCreadie, who is still inexperienced at skip, all the confidence he needs to reach the podium.

Team GB putting on a demo Feb 24 at East Kilbride

Team Britain will demonstrate their sport at the East Kilbride Ice Rink, East Kilbride centre, on Wednesday 24 February, 12noon-1.00pm.

CLICK HERE for details

Team GB enter and win Scottish Championships

Aileen Nielsen, Jim Sellar, Tom Killin, Michael McCreadie, Angie Malone

Team Great Britain, all Scots, were one of ten teams competing in this weekend's Scottish Championship at Aberdeen. They went unbeaten, stealing in the 5th and 6th to take the final 7-2 against Jim Elliot. (thanks Bob Cowan)

Full results are HERE

It was never a possibility that Team Canada would compete in a national championship prior to the Paralympics, though Jim Armstrong, before his latest injury, had told me he was open to competing in his provincial championship had not the Nationals been forced to schedule at the same time as the Paralympics.

Using the Paralympics to publicise the sport

Team GB third Aileen Neilson gave an extended interview to Paul Thomson of the East Kilbride News. She talks about her life before her disability, how she came into wheelchair curling, how she has prepared for Vancouver and her hopes for success.

Scots curlers, who make up the Great Britain team, are generously financed by the government and appear to see publicity as part of their responsibility to the sport. I have recently linked to articles mentioning every member of their team.

Team USA also feature regularly in the press and media, as the USA curling authorities understand that the national team is their best advertisement for increasing participation. Again I have linked to articles on all the team.

Canada has instituted a pre-Paralympics media protocol explicitly discouraging informal press (including me) contact with team members, and insisting that all requests for interviews be cleared with a "media liason officer." Standard procedure. apparently, but just one reason why you'll find so little information about the team on this blog, or read mainstream media stories covering anything other than Jim Armstrong's phoenix-like rise from the ashes of a ruined able-bodied curling career.

Team Canada, also funded by public money, should be doing everything in their power to court publicity, realising that often means not only going out of their way to contact media with stories, but supplying journalists, notoriously lazy, with material.

Instead they issue no press releases, or invitations to watch the team prepare.  They don't train in different locales while inviting local curlers to interact with the team, which would attract local TV.

You can call it necessary focus, and claim that gold in Vancouver wipes away all objections, but making a two year campaign solely about winning a gold medal puts everything in just one basket, and we can only hope it's a sturdy one.

To be successful a sport has to make its audience care about the participants. If all Canadians are asked to care about is a gold medal, then it's a disaster getting anything less. But more, once the competition is over, people will stop caring, and that's no way to nuture a sport and provide for the future.

GB's Jim Sellar to retire if successful in Vancouver

(photo - Bob Cowan)

Team Great Britain's Jim Sellar, the likely fifth in Vancouver, told the Bellshill Speaker that he will retire from competitive sports if successful in Vancouver. Sellar (53), who is also a champion bowler, has curled for nine years and has represented Scotland at five World Championships, winning gold in 2004.

Read the article HERE.

Team Great Britain officially announced

Team Great Britain 2010

The Royal Caledonian CC, the governing body of British curling, announced a familiar five names as the official Team Great Britain. Michael McCreadie will skip an all Scot squad that includes two other members of the team that suffered the heartbreak loss to Canada in Turin., Angie Malone and Tom Killin. They are joined by Aileen Neilson who took a leave of absence from her teaching job to train ful-time, and Jim Sellar who has attended four World Championships.

Said Michael McCreadie: "It is an honour for me to Skip the British team at the Paralympics in Vancouver. I make up 20% of the playing Team and there are four others who are truly world class performers. We have worked extremely hard to get back into winning ways, with the results from this year's tour clearly indicating we are on the right track. Preparations have gone really well and we plan in the next nine weeks to hone ourselves into a formidable adversary ready to take on the rest of the world."

Read the official announcement HERE.

The rationale behind Team GB's changed delivery zone

Tem GB 2nd Tom Killin
(Photo Bob Cowan)

The Institute Of Sport, SportScotland's high performances arm, has published a paper describing why Team Great Britain throw from 10 or 15 feet further from the near hogline than any other team.

The short answer is that Coach Tom Pendreigh in consultation with Senior Sports Psychologist John Marchant, and Head of Sports Science and Innovation, Malcolm Fairweather, think they found a competitive edge.

Moving closer to the hack at delivery allows the stone to cross the hogline further from the centre line, widening the range available of shots.

The coaches expected an initial "dip" in performance, evident in Scotland requiring a tie-break victory at the 2009 Worlds to avoid having to re qualify. But with the goal Vancouver 2010, and resources devoted to physical conditioning and psychological profiling, the coaches "see their hard work paying off, with a team who are more unified, happier and more performance focused than ever before."

Read the report HERE.

Some quick observations.

Recent rule changes moving rocks from centre line at delivery negate much of the presumed advantage.

Vancouver 2010 ice, based on the 2009 Worlds, will have plenty of swing, perhaps making it unnecessary to add more width by moving back.

The further away you throw, he more opportunity for things to go wrong.

Players moving forward to throw takeout weight add another variable for the person holding the broom.

And finally, other international high performance coaches have had two years to consider this experiment and have declined to follow suit. Team GB will have to keep believing that they are right and everyone else is wrong.

My personal take: this may have seemed a good idea under the old rules, and started a multi-disciplinary process that gathered a momentum impossible to stop, or perhaps stopping would have been even more disruptive than playing it out.

The wheelchair curlers were Britain's only Paralympic medallists in Torino. Their semi-professional squad faces enormous pressure to win. They've gambled on a radical change they hope will come good in March. If it does, they'll be copied. If it doesn't look for Coach Pendreigh to take the blame.

GB finish the year win win at Lausanne Bonspiel

Team Great Britain followed their appearance in the final of the Kathy Kerr in Ottawa by traveling to Lausanne, Switzerland the following weekend. Two teams from Great Britain competed against eight teams from France and Switzerland, with Manfred Bollinger's Berne team expected to offer the stiffest opposition to the McCreadie rink.

Unfortunately, the Swiss and Berne skip Manfred Bollinger caught his hand in a door and broke a finger and was unable to compete.

Great Britain went undefeated, beating a team from the Strasbourg CC 19-3 in the final. Team GB's coach Tom Pendreigh's report on the trip is HERE.

Full results are available HERE

Great Britain have one more event on their pre-Paralympics schedule, a home spiel with Sweden, Germany and Norway expected to compete.

Team GB's Aileen Nielson talks about the team's progress

 Ailkeen Nielson - photo courtesy of Bob Cowan

Though Scottish wheelchair curlers have struggled in recent years, after a bronze at the 2007 World Championships failing to bring home major silverware from the past two World Championships, Aileen Nelson told Chris Cottrell:

"Sometimes the pressure of expectation really drives you on. I think that's the effect it's had on us and we've used it in our build up and preparation for the event.

"Wheelchair curling is still a relatively new sport and I think there's been major progressions from other countries as players have become more experienced over the last few years.

"But we've been quite busy travelling over the past few months, preparing for Vancouver and things have been going really well."

Read the whole interview HERE

USA beat Great Britain in Cathy Kerr final

Teams had an early start Sunday morning as the semi-finals of the the Annual Cathy Kerr Memorial Spiel began at 8.30am at Ottawa's RA Club.

Great Britain beat Chris Sobkowicz's Manitobans 6-3 and USA beat last year's Ontario champions Team Gregory 8-6.

In the afternoon final it was USA over Great Britain 9-4, with Gregory claiming bronze with a 9-5 win over Sobkowicz. Great Britain had Michael McCreadie calling the game from 3rd with Aileen Nielsen throwing last rocks. Team USA rotated their fifth player, who then skipped the USA 2 side.

In the recreation division Robert Michel was the winner and Aaron Wong-Sing was the runner-up. Both teams are from Ottawa.

The results mean that Bruce Cameron, Ken Gregory and Chris Rees all qualify for the Ontario ParaSports Winter Games to be held in Kingston in January 2010. Richard Fraser will be the alternate.

During the semis and finals, the other competitive teams curled for pride and experience so everyone had six games over the weekend.

Meanwhile Great Britain and USA play in Ottawa

Bruce Cameron and the Capital Wheelchair Curling Club have assembled the largest competitive field outside of a national championships for the 5th Annual Cathy Kerr Memorial Spiel at the RA Curling Club in Ottawa this weekend.

Ten teams, including Great Britain and two teams from the USA are competing against teams from Manitoba, Quebec and five Ontario teams. This is also a qualifying event to become one of the three teams that wlll attend the Ontario Winter ParaSports Games to be held in Kingston in January 2010.

There are two pools

Group A                                        Group B

Gregory (Bradford)                        Cameron (Ottawa)
Rees  (Toronto)                            Fraser (Ottawa)
Claus (London ON)                        USA 1 (Perez)
Great Britain  (McCreadie)              Manitoba (Sobkowicz)
USA 2                                          Quebec   

Draw 1 Results

Manitoba 6-4  Fraser (Ottawa)

Great Britain 9-5  Rees (Toronto)

USA 2  17-4   Claus (London)

Cameron (Ottawa)  11-4  Quebec

Draw 2 Results

USA 2  8-7  Rees (Toronto)

USA 1  11-2  Quebec

Gregory (Bradford) 16-0  Claus (London)

Cameron (Ottawa) 9-4  Fraser (Ottawa)

There is also a recreational division with four teams from the Capital Wheelchair urling Club and one team from Quebec.