18/02/2025
As much as we enjoy tournaments in Curling Tallinn , they always seem to come at the wrong time for us—either early in the first part of the season or early in the second, when we're out of shape, as we almost always are :) Especially this year, since we don't have curling ice in our country and, in our city, no ice for curling at all.
At the 9th Tallinn Masters Mixed Doubles 2025, our group included previous tournament winners/WCF tour leaders, recent World MD silver medalists, and recent Olympic bronze medalists :D Thankfully, there were two other teams we could try to compete with after spending three days practicing. One was a host team from Tallinn (one of two in our group), and the Wiksten father/daughter duo from Denmark. We knew the best we could aim for was two wins. And two wins it was.
We were completely and deservedly destroyed on the first day by the previous tournament winners from Germany. But on the second day, things went much better for us—first we won against the Estonian team. In the evening, we faced the Olympic bronze medalists from Norway, a team we've played at least three times in our careers without success, so our hopes were low. They punished us for every centimeter early on, but the result was still manageable. In the 7th end with their power play, we were already warming up our hands for handshakes when they missed a hit for 3 points. With one stolen point, we decided to go to the 8th end, where we needed to steal at least 2 for an extra end. The rest, as they say, is history—we stole 3 and won the match.
It was probably the first match where joy was overshadowed by confusion and a kind of unpleasant feeling for ruining another team's chances of making the playoffs (though they ended up ruining them themselves with bad t-shots). That was new for us. The next day, we faced a winless Danish team that was on fire and left us no chance. Finally, we were once again destroyed by the World silver medalists from Tallinn—likely our favorite MD team in the world.
Another first (twice!) was that we didn’t manage to get selfies with teams that lost to us. I don’t blame them—it’s just a pity. But as we’ve said before: learning to lose is just as hard as learning to win.
