Ben Hebert and the rest of Canada’s Brad Jacobs rink plan to share Olympic triumph with fans in St. John’s, NL
It will be difficult for Regina curler Ben Hebert and the rest of Canada’s Brad Jacobs rink to top the attention they got at the recent Winter Olympics in Italy when they play in the Montana’s Brier, which gets underway Friday evening in St. John’s, Newfoundland.
Their Brier kickoff comes after they persevered through the “double-touching” controversy at the Milano-Cortina Winter Games on their way to Olympic gold.
Early in the tournament, Swedish curler Oskar Eriksson accused Canada’s Marc Kennedy of cheating by touching the rock again after initially releasing it, which prompted a profanity-laced response from Kennedy.
“I’m glad that my mic was muted because I gave it to him just as good as Marc did,” Hebert told The Morning Edition host Adam Hunter. “And that’s what he deserved for trying to pull a stunt like that at the Olympic Games.
“We’re fine with it. We’re all out there being competitive. But if you wanted to go down that route of the bully mode and do that stuff on national television, that’s how you deal with bullies. Punch him right in the mouth. And that’s what we did.”
The thrill of winning his second Olympic men’s curling gold medal is still with Ben Hebert. The Team Canada lead reflects on his experience in Italy — including the fans, the big win and the ‘double-touching’ controversy.
Kennedy’s language resulted in a warning from World Curling.
That viral clip, and the ensuing debate about curling’s rules, put the team and the sport in the international spotlight.
“In our room, if it was something that was real, that we did something wrong or someone was feeling guilty about anything, maybe we would potentially have not been able to rally,” Hebert said. “But we knew it was all just noise.”
Hebert said it’s an irrelevant rule that doesn’t change the game and is a non-issue 99.9 per cent of the time, adding he believes the World Curling Federation will change it.
“And now that it’s over, all it really did was bring some amazing curling attention to our sport,” he said. “And we still got to walk away with our shiny gold medals. So it was a beautiful cherry on top of a good week. And [Sweden] finished dead last, which is even better, actually.”
Before their gold medal victory, Hebert said he and his teammates focused on the positives: that Canadians had their back and their country was sticking with them all the way.
Hebert, 42, now has two Olympic gold medals after winning gold with Kevin Martin in Vancouver in 2010.
He said his family flew home a couple of days after this most recent gold-medal victory, they were all jet-lagged, his kids have been sick, and he was off to the Brier by the middle of this week.
“So real quick turn-around,” he said. “Life is crazy, busy schedule at the moment, but I wouldn’t want it any other way.”
He said he and his teammates have taken their gold medals to Newfoundland and plan to take a lot of pictures, tell some stories, and share this moment with that part of Canada.
Hebert and the rest of the Brad Jacobs rink open their defence of their Brier title Friday evening against Prince Edward Island’s Tyler Smith.
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