A week after Gushue, Mark Nichols, Brett Gallant took part in the uniquely formatted Everest Challenge in Fredericton, N.B., they were back on the ice for the Canad Inns mixed doubles championship in Winnipeg over the weekend.
While the Everest Challenge was also a mixed event, it was different in that it featured eight four-member teams put together in a draft, with the rule no regular team members could be together. The Canada Inn championship was a 48-team, triple-knockout setup and involved the two-person teams standard in the mixed doubles competitions that are becoming increasingly popular in the sport.
Gushue claimed the title and a share of $200,000 winners prize in Fredericton, while Gallant was runner-up in Winnipeg as he and Jocelyn Peterman lost 7-3 to the Alberta team of Chelsea Carey and Colin Hodgson in Sunday’s final at the Granite Club.
Peterman is normally second for Carey’s Calgary-based team that won the 2016 Scotties Canadian women’s title.
She helped Gallant knock off two of his teammates en route to Sunday’s championship game. They defeated Gushue and his teammate, Val Sweeting of Alberta, in the round of 16, then Walker and Laura Crocker of Edmonton in the quarter-finals. Nichols and Breanne Knap of Regina were also eliminated in the quarter-final round.
Gushue and his teammates will be back together as a unit next weekend for the first event of their regular 2017-18 World Curling Tour schedule as they take part in the Tour Challenge in Regina, which is also first competition in the Pinty’s Grand Slam of Curling . It will be what Gushue has described as “the real start” what is setting up to be a big curling season that, among other things, will see his team attempt to chase down a berth in the 2018 Winter Olympics at the Canadian Trials in Ottawa in early December and wear Team Canada colours as the defending national men’s champions at the Brier in Regina in March.
Brad Gushue’s curling team was mixing it up again
Brad Gushue and his world curling champion teammates are getting used to playing against each other.
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