Competition begins Tuesday for Island curler Adam Casey
Some of Canada’s best curlers are in Summerside, P.E.I., for one final run at the Olympic curling trials.
The Home Hardware Road to the Roar began Monday afternoon at Credit Union Place.
There will be four draws a day from Tuesday to Friday with the playoffs scheduled for the weekend.
The final four slots in the Olympic trials will go to the top two female and male teams.
It’s a talented field including two Olympic medalists: John Morris and Shannon Kleibrink. Four-time world champion Glenn Howard also has a team, as does back-to-back world junior champion Kelsey Roque.
Charlottetown’s Robbie Doherty will be an alternate on the Greg Balsdon team from Kingston, Ont.
Seven Mile Bay’s own Adam Casey will be skipping the team he played with out of Regina last year.
Casey said he loves any chance to get to play in front of his home crowd.
“I know we’re from Saskatchewan on paper,” he said, “but I think we’ll have the P.E.I. crowd behind us.”
‘There’s certainly a buzz’
Two years of planning went into bringing The Road to the Roar event to the City of Summerside with more than 120 volunteers helping out with this week’s activities.
“When you drop 20 plus teams of some fairly big name curlers into our community, you can feel it,” said JP Desrosiers, Community Service Director for the City of Summerside.
Everything will lead to Ottawa next month where the best teams in the country will compete for two spots at the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyongyang, South Korea. (Tom Steepe/CBC)
Al Cameron, Director of Communications and Media with Curl Canada, said every competitor has spent the last two years working to qualify for this process.
“Right now all 14 men’s and 14 women’s teams are right on the doorstep and trust me, there’s vision of gold medals dancing in their heads,” he said.