Olympic trials are competitions held in certain sports to select teams' participants in those sports at the Olympic Games. [1] [2] [3] [4]
Olympic trials are competitions held in certain sports to select teams' participants in those sports at the Olympic Games. [1] [2] [3] [4]
 | The examples and perspective in this section deal primarily with the United States and do not represent a worldwide view of the subject.(August 2024) |
Before 1908, members of United States Olympic teams were selected without trials. The 1908 and 1912 teams were selected based on regional trials, though the Eastern trials were favored. In the United States, no Olympic trials were held in 1916 due to World War I, nor in 1940 and 1944 due to World War II, though Olympic marathon team members were named in 1940. [5]
Olympic trials include:
John C. Morris is a Canadian curler, and two-time Olympic gold medallist from Canmore, Alberta. Morris played third for the Kevin Martin team until April 24, 2013. Morris, author of the book Fit to Curl, is the son of Maureen and Earle Morris, inventor of the "Stabilizer" curling broom. Morris grew up in Gloucester, Ontario and at the age of five began curling at the Navy Curling Club.
Joseph Polo is an American curler who is best known for winning a bronze medal at the 2006 Winter Olympics and being the alternate on the gold-medal winning United States men's team at the 2018 Winter Olympics. Polo was raised in Floodwood, Minnesota before moving to Cass Lake. He learned to curl in nearby Bemidji at the age of 10 in the Bemidji Curling Club's Sunday Night Junior League.
John Shuster is an American curler who lives in Superior, Wisconsin. He led Team USA to gold at the 2018 Winter Olympics, the first American team to ever win gold in curling. He also won a bronze medal at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin. He has played in five straight Winter Olympics and eleven World Curling Championships.
Matthew James Hamilton is an American curler from McFarland, Wisconsin. He currently plays front-end on Team John Shuster. He is a World Junior Champion, World Men's bronze medalist, and Olympic gold medalist.
Lesley Kaitlyn Lawes is a Canadian curler. Lawes was the long time third for the Jennifer Jones team that represented Canada at the 2014 Winter Olympics where they won the gold medal. They were the first women's team to go through the Olympics undefeated and the first Manitoba based curling team to win at the Olympics. Lawes curled with John Morris in the mixed doubles event at the 2018 Winter Olympics where they won gold. This win made her and Morris the first Canadian curlers to win two Olympic gold medals, and Lawes was the first to win gold in two consecutive Olympics.
The World Curling Championships are the annual world championships for curling, organized by the World Curling Federation and contested by national championship teams. There are men's, women's and mixed doubles championships, as well as men's and women's versions of junior and senior championships. There is also a world championship for wheelchair curling. The men's championship started in 1959, while the women's started in 1979. The mixed doubles championship was started in 2008. Since 2005, the men's and women's championships have been held in different venues, with Canada hosting one of the two championships every year: the men's championship in odd years, and the women's championship in even years. Canada has dominated both the men's and women's championships since their inception, although Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Scotland, the United States, Norway and China have all won at least one championship.
Satsuki Fujisawa is a Japanese curler from Kitami, Hokkaido. As a skip, she has won the Japanese national championship six times. Fujisawa skipped the bronze medal-winning Japanese team at the 2018 Winter Olympic Games and the silver medal-winning team at the 2022 Winter Olympics. She is currently the skip of the Loco Solare curling team.
Tabitha Skelly Peterson is an American curler from Minneapolis, Minnesota. She was a bronze medalist at the 2010 World Junior Championships and is a three-time women's national champion. She currently is skip of her own team, having traded positions with Nina Roth during the 2020 off-season.
The curling competition of the 2018 Winter Olympics was held between 8 and 25 February 2018 at the Gangneung Curling Centre. This was the seventh time that curling is on the Olympic program. In each of the men's and women's competitions, ten nations competed. A third competition was added for the 2018 Olympics, mixed doubles, in which teams consist of one woman and one man. There were eight participating countries in the doubles competition.
A total of 10 teams in each tournament qualified for a quota of 100 athletes in curling at the 2018 Winter Olympics. A further 8 mixed doubles pairs qualified for a total of 16 athletes. Therefore, a total of 116 athletes qualified in total to compete in the curling competitions.
Chiaki Matsumura is a Japanese curler from Nagano. She was a longtime member of the Chubu Electric Power curling team from 2012 to 2023. With the team, she won five Japan Curling Championships in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2017 and 2019. At the international level, she has represented Japan three times at the World Women's Curling Championship and three times at the Pacific-Asia Curling Championships, winning a silver medal in both 2012 and 2019.
Mixed-sex sports are individual and team sports whose participants are not of a single sex. In many organised sports settings, rules dictate an equal number of people of each sex in a team. Usually, the main purpose of these rules are to account for physiological sex differences. Mixed-sex sports in informal settings are typically groups of neighbours, friends or family playing without regard to the sex of the participants. Mixed-sex play is also common in youth sports as before puberty and adolescence, sport-relevant sex differences affect performance far less.
Great Britain, or in full Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the team of the British Olympic Association (BOA), which represents the United Kingdom, competed at the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. Originally scheduled to take place from 24 July to 9 August 2020, the Games were postponed to 23 July to 8 August 2021, because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
A total of 10 teams in each tournament will qualify for a quota of 100 athletes in curling at the 2022 Winter Olympics. A further 10 mixed doubles pairs will qualify for a total of 20 athletes. Therefore, a total of 120 athletes can qualify in total to compete in the curling competitions.
The curling competitions of the 2022 Winter Olympics were held at the Beijing National Aquatics Centre, one of the Olympic Green venues. Curling competitions were scheduled for every day of the games, from February 2 to February 20. This was the eighth time that curling was part of the Olympic program.
The COVID-19 pandemic caused the most significant disruption to the worldwide sporting calendar since World War II. Across the world and to varying degrees, sports events were cancelled or postponed. The 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo were rescheduled to 2021. At the time, spectators had no games to watch and players no games to play. Only a few countries and territories—such as Hong Kong, Turkmenistan, Belarus, and Nicaragua—continued professional sporting matches as planned.
The 2020–21 curling season began in August 2020 and ended in May 2021.
The 2021 World Mixed Doubles Curling Championship was held from May 17 to 23 in Aberdeen, Scotland.
The 2021–22 curling season began in June 2021 and ended in May 2022.
The 2022 World Mixed Doubles Curling Championship was held from April 23 to 30 at the Curling Club Trois-Chêne in the Geneva Sous-Moulin Sports Center in Thônex, a suburb of Geneva, Switzerland. The event was held alongside the 2022 World Senior Curling Championships. Eve Muirhead and Bobby Lammie of Scotland went undefeated the entire event, beating home team Alina Pätz and Sven Michel of Switzerland 9-7 in the final to win the gold medal.
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