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Winter Olympics: U.S. men win country's first gold medal in curling

 
Team skip John Shuster reacts after throwing the last stone and scoring 5 on the eighth end against Sweden during the gold-medal match on Saturday, Feb. 24, 2018, at the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics' Gangneung Curling Centre. The USA won, 10-7. (Carlos Gonzalez/Minneapolis Star Tribune/TNS) 1224479
Team skip John Shuster reacts after throwing the last stone and scoring 5 on the eighth end against Sweden during the gold-medal match on Saturday, Feb. 24, 2018, at the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics' Gangneung Curling Centre. The USA won, 10-7. (Carlos Gonzalez/Minneapolis Star Tribune/TNS) 1224479
Published Feb. 24, 2018

GANGNEUNG, South Korea — John Shuster, the face of U.S. curling for the past four Winter Olympics — and all the good and bad those experiences have entailed — had a gold medal draped around his neck for the first time in his life Saturday. Moments before, he and his teammates had done what jubilant curlers do, raising their brooms aloft in screaming excitement over an improbable victory. Yet at that moment, it was hard to believe how close his dream in these Games had come to crumbling apart.

A week ago today, after a loss to Norway, the Americans were on the brink of elimination, again.

After the game, with his wife and two kids headed to a hotel and his wife's encouraging words ringing in his head, Shuster found a grassy spot outside the venue, sat down and came to a realization.

"This is silly," U.S. skip, or captain, told himself. "I'm getting my heart broken, I feel like, by this sport — and this is silly. Seriously, this is the Olympics."

"I woke up in the morning and saw a story on Dan Jansen, who waited till his last moment to write his story," Shuster said. "He had the same thing, and he got back up and changed his story. I'm so proud I was able to do something similar."

Jansen, the hard-luck American speed skater with Wisconsin roots close to the curling team's, won his only Olympic medal, a gold, in the final race of his third, and final, Winter Games in 1994. With no other alternative, Shuster's team decided to just have fun and see where that took them. It never lost again.

•••

Five consecutive victories culminated Saturday night in something that has never happened before: an Olympic gold for the U.S. curlers as they defeated Sweden 10-7 before a flag-waving throng from back home. Shuster and teammates Tyler George, Matt Hamilton and John Landsteiner defeated Sweden, the top-ranked team in the world, so soundly that the Swedes conceded the match with several rocks to play in the 10th and final end.

The victory was as decisive as it was unexpected — to everyone, perhaps, but the Americans themselves.

"This," George said, "is a team that never gives up."

The United States is not known as a curling powerhouse. Americans had never won a gold medal in the sport, and before Saturday, it had won just one other, bronze in 2006 by a team on which Shuster played. For that reason and more, members of this team expressed hope that curling would become more than a cultural curiosity every four years. Perhaps the team's success can help.

"We want our sport to be loved by our country as much as we love it," George said. "There's a reason why we play it, and there's a reason why we love it as much as we do."

The win came with its share of thrills.

On Saturday, Shuster delivered the biggest shot in the history of U.S. curling when he cleared two Swedish stones with his final rock of the eighth end to score five points and give his team a 10-5 lead.

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"During the entire end, we could kind of feel it building," Shuster said. "(The Swedes') margin for error got incredibly small."

Shuster had executed a perfect shot: a blend of cool-handed finesse and foolproof strategy. His team's lead was suddenly insurmountable.

"We knew we were going to lose," Swedish skip Niklas Edin said.

•••

This was Shuster's fourth consecutive Olympic appearance, and he has experienced all the joy and heartbreak that the Games can offer. After helping the United States to bronze in 2006, the Americans' next two trips to the Olympics were unmitigated disasters: last place in 2010 and next-to-last place in 2014.

It got so bad that the word "shuster" was added to the Urban Dictionary. (Definition: "A verb meaning to fail to meet expectations, particularly at a moment critical for success or even slightly respectable results," as in "Man, he really shustered that!") Then, in the summer of 2014, Shuster was cut from USA Curling's high-performance program.

"Everything happens for a reason," he said.

Then Shuster, a native of Chisholm, Minn., who lives in Superior, Wis., found three curlers who still believed in him: George, a liquor salesman in Duluth, Minn., who competes in 8-year-old sneakers with holes in them; Hamilton, a sweeping wizard from McFarland, Wis., renowned for his mustache; and Landsteiner, an engineer in Duluth.

The team became known in curling circles as Team Reject, a moniker it came to embrace. And the curlers began the slow climb back to respectability, through the national ranks, through the Olympic trials and through the Olympic bonspiel, or tournament, in South Korea, where they surmounted all kinds of obstacles.

The United States had to beat three-time defending champion Canada — which it had never beaten at the Olympics — twice in four days just to reach the final.

"From the day that the 2014 Olympics came to an end, every single day was with this journey in mind," Shuster said.

That much was clear as the members of Team Reject stood together atop the medal podium. Their journey was complete.

Well, almost. It had one more glitch. After the ceremony, the Americans took a close look at their medals and noticed something was off. Etched on the golds were "Women's Curling." They had gotten the medals stamped for the winners of the other tournament. They quickly got the right ones.

"It wasn't a big deal at all, I promise," Shuster said, smiling.

Information from the New York Post was used in this report.