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One of the biggest events in the run-up to the Winter Olympics begins this weekend as the Canadian curling trials get underway in Halifax.
Eight of the top men’s teams and eight of the top women’s teams in the country will compete for the chance to represent Canada in the four-player curling events this February in northern Italy. Canada’s entry for the mixed doubles event was decided last season when the married couple of Jocelyn Peterman and Brett Gallant won their trials and then clinched an Olympic spot for Canada with their sixth-place finish at the world championships.
The men’s and women’s trials both open on Saturday at the same arena and follow the same format. They start with a round robin where all the teams play each other once. The team with the best record advances directly to the final, while the second- and third-place teams meet in a semifinal next Thursday to decide who will face the No. 1 seed.
In a change from previous trials, the final is a best-of-three series rather than a single game. Both finals will be played next Friday and Saturday, with the rubber matches on the Sunday if necessary.
Whoever survives this gauntlet will be tasked with restoring Canada’s faded reputation in Olympic curling. Since Brad Jacobs and Jennifer Jones swept the men’s and women’s golds at the 2014 Games in Russia, Canada has earned just one medal in the four-person events — a bronze by Brad Gushue in 2022.
Worse, half of Canada’s Olympic quartets over that time span missed the playoffs, and not for a lack of star power. The four skips who represented Canada at the 2018 and 2022 Games — Gushue, Jones, Rachel Homan and Kevin Koe — own a combined 21 national championships and eight world titles.
Meanwhile, Canada’s track record in the newer discipline of mixed doubles has been, well, mixed. Kaitlyn Lawes and John Morris won gold in the inaugural Olympic tournament in 2018, but Morris and Homan missed the playoffs in 2022.
So, who will wear the maple leaf in Italy this February? To help answer that question, we asked our friends at Shoreview Sports Analytics to crunch the numbers and find out which teams are most likely to win a ticket to the Olympics.
As Shoreview’s Mike Heenan explains it, his firm produced a statistical rating for each team using what’s known as the Bradley-Terry model, which estimates each team’s underlying strength based on pairwise comparisons — in other words, who would beat who in individual matchups. The model puts the highest weight on the most recent results, with the weight of each game decreasing until it falls out of consideration after two years. Using those ratings, Shoreview simulated the men’s and women’s trials 10,000 times and looked at all of those simulations to see how often each team finished in each position.
Now let’s take a look at both tournaments.
Women’s
Rachel Homan’s team has gone undefeated at the last two Scotties Tournament of Hearts and hasn’t lost to a Canadian opponent in over a year. (David Jackson/The Canadian Press)
You don’t need a fancy statistical model to tell you that Rachel Homan is a huge favourite to win this event.
The 36-year-old skip and her teammates Tracy Fleury, Emma Miskew and Sarah Wilkes are the undisputed queens of global women’s curling, winning back-to-back world championships in 2024 and 2025. Last season, they won better than 90 per cent of their games, captured two Grand Slam titles and reached the final of the other three Slams. So far this season, they’ve won all three Slams.
Domestically, Homan’s rink has been even more dominant — almost to an absurd degree. They went undefeated at the last two Scotties Tournament of Hearts, and they haven’t lost a single game to a Canadian opponent in more than a year.
Still, it’s good to see if the numbers agree with everyone’s feeling that Homan is going to run away with this thing. And they very much do.
(Shoreview Sports Analytics )
That’s pretty wild. Homan has a 91 per cent chance of winning the trials, while no one else — including four-time Scotties champ Kerri Einarson and Kaitlyn Lawes, the 2018 Olympic mixed doubles gold medallist — has even a 1-in-20 shot.
Mike also noted to me that the switch to a best-of-three final makes the chance of an upset significantly lower. Homan would have been “only” an 82 per cent favourite if the final was still a one-off.
So, a better question than “who’s going to win the women’s trials?” might be “who’s Homan going to beat in the final?” Here’s what the numbers say:
(Shoreview Sports Analytics )
Again, the Homan Empire casts a long shadow. The top seven most likely matchups all include Homan, and no one has better than a seven per cent chance of beating her head-to-head in the final. The odds of anyone even forcing her to a deciding third game are not good.
Assuming Homan does win the trials, she’ll face stiffer competition at the Olympics. With Canada’s vaunted depth fading on the women’s side in recent years, Einarson is currently the only other Canadian skip in the top 10 of Ken Pomeroy’s global power ratings. And she’s eighth.
The gold-medal game in Italy is shaping up as a battle between Homan and Switzerland’s Silvana Tirinzoni, who won four straight world championships before Homan defeated her in the last two title games. Homan has also beaten Tirinzoni in all three Grand Slam finals this season.
However, both skips will have to prove they can deliver under the bright lights of the Olympics. In 2018, Homan was the reigning world champion with Miskew and two different teammates when she went a disastrous 4-5 and missed the playoffs in South Korea. In 2022 in Beijing, Homan again failed to advance after she and Morris went 5-4 in mixed doubles. Tirinzoni also went 4-5 to miss the playoffs in 2018, then flamed out with losses in the semifinals and the bronze game after going 8-1 in the round robin.
Men’s
Men’s favourite Brad Jacobs took a break from curling before returning to win the Brier and a bronze at the world championships last season. (Chris Young/The Canadian Press)
If the women’s trials seem like little more than a coronation for Homan, the men’s event promises a lot more action. With no clear favourite in the field, several skips can credibly hope to be clutching a ticket to Italy next weekend.
Here’s what the Shoreview model says:
(Shoreview Sports Analytics )
What a difference, eh? The “favourite” here only has about a 1-in-3 chance of winning, there’s another guy right up there with him, and another with a decent 1-in-5 shot. The skip with the fourth-best odds is at 7.4 per cent — not great, but still much better than the No. 4 woman, who’s under 1 per cent.
I think most people would agree with Brad Jacobs as a slight favourite. The 40-year-old reigning Brier champion won Olympic gold in 2014 and nearly made it back eight years later, losing to Gushue in the final of the last Canadian trials. Jacobs then stepped away from curling for a bit before returning and eventually joining up with Marc Kennedy, Brett Gallant and Ben Hebert in the spring of 2024. The veteran foursome had a great first season together, winning the Brier and taking bronze at the world championships after a semifinal loss to eventual champ Bruce Mouat of Scotland.
Anyone who doesn’t follow curling closely might be surprised to see Matt Dunstone as the de facto co-favourite alongside Jacobs. The 30-year-old has never won the Brier, and his only appearance in the Canadian trials as a skip resulted in a 3-5 finish four years ago. But Dunstone has been consistently in the mix at the Brier, making it to the semifinals in four of the last five years and reaching the finals twice — including last season, when Jacobs scored a triple with the final rock to beat him 5-3. Interesting fact: brothers Ryan and E.J. Harnden, who make up the front end on Dunstone’s team, won Olympic gold with Jacobs in 2014.
Dunstone’s rink, which also includes third Colton Lott, has been the best Canadian team on the Grand Slam tour this season, winning one title and reaching the final of the other two events. They beat Scotland’s Ross Whyte in the opener before losing to Mouat, the reigning world champ, in the next two.
Mouat remains atop Pomeroy’s global men’s power ratings, with Dunstone and Jacobs tied for second and John Epping right behind them.
Epping, who the Shoreview model gives a 1-in-5 chance of winning the trials, has a solid 31-11 record this season but is just 6-8 against opponents in the Pomeroy top 10 and has never played in a Brier title game. He did, however, have a nice run at last season’s Canadian championship after teaming up with young brothers Jacob and Tanner Horgan. They went 6-2 but missed the playoffs after losing a tiebreaker.
The other thing that might surprise a lot of people in the Shoreview projections is Brad Gushue’s odds of winning being below two per cent. It was only 18 months ago that Gushue won his third straight Brier title, giving him a record six for his career. But he hasn’t won a tournament since, as the decision to replace E.J. Harnden with former skip Brendan Bottcher at second has not paid off. Gushue’s squad is just 2-9 against Pomeroy top-10 foes this season, and the 45-year-old skip announced in September that he’ll retire after this season.
Here’s a look at the most likely matchups for the men’s final, and each skip’s odds of winning them:
(Shoreview Sports Analytics )
As you can see again here, there’s a wide range of plausible outcomes for the men’s tournament. And, with around a 50/50 likelihood of the final going the full three games, a good chance for a dramatic ending.
