Guess who’s leading the Ford World Women’s Curling Championship with four round-robin matches remaining?
What’s that? Who? Odds are you wouldn’t have mentioned unsung Korea, a nation with a handful of curlers competing at this level for only the fourth time in history.
Team Korea sweeps hard during the 2012 Ford World Women’s Curling Championship. (Photo: CCA/Michael Burns Photography)
But it was Ji-Sun Kim’s team from Euijeongbu City, north of Seoul, that moved to the top of the standings Tuesday night at the Enmax Centre, outlasting its Pacific Rim rivals from China 7-5 to expand its record to six wins in seven games.
That’s right! Korea! Six wins! Double the nation’s best-ever output at the World level.
Korea first sent a team to the World rockfest in 2002. It didn’t win a game and it was back to the drawing board.
Seven years later, another Korean team skipped by Mi-Yeon Kim managed three wins.
Ji-Sun Kim skipped Korea’s third entry last year and won twice. Which brings the story front and centre to the current skirmishing and the current astounding record.
“Maybe lucky,” said a choked-up 24-year-old Kim.
“Maybe very lucky. Yah, very unbelievable!”
Korea hit for an opening three but China stickhandled in front 5-4 after six panels. Then Korea took a go-ahead pair in the eighth, 2009 world champion Bingyu Wang (2-5) blanked the ninth but was short on an open last-rock draw in the 10th, yielding a critical stolen point.
A three-team traffic jam developed one game off Korea’s pace with Canada, Sweden and Switzerland sharing 5-and-2 records.
Nobody else in the field boasted a winning record heading into the penultimate day of round-robin action starting at 9 a.m. MT. And two of those teams with a pair of defeats — homestanding Canada, represented by Heather Nedohin’s Edmonton troops, and unsung Korea were on a collision course in today’s morning matches.
Canada tumbled off its perch for the second straight night. The Nedohin-skipped unit was outpointed 8-4 by Sweden’s Margaretha Sigfridsson.