BROOMFIELD — To someone unfamiliar with the finer points of curling, it looked like a miracle shot — a winning three-pointer at the buzzer, a toe-dragging catch in the corner of the end zone with zeros on the game clock.
Actually it was a glorious mistake on the last throw that put Team Tyler George in today’s men’s championship at the Olympic Trials at the Broomfield Event Center.
“It was a miss,” George was quick to confess after throwing the winner that beat Team John Shuster 6-5 Friday and moved his foursome within one game of the Vancouver Olympics.
Shuster’s team had a rock in the “house” that would have stood as the winner, if not for George’s fluke. George aimed at a “guard” rock in front of the house, intending for that rock to knock Shuster’s out of scoring position. It missed Shuster’s stone but unintentionally knocked one of George’s rocks into the “button” (bull’s eye) for the win.
“I feel a little bad about winning the game that way, but I feel like we controlled the game from start to finish,” George said. “You play the game to set up that situation, and you take a break when you can get it.”
Fluke or not, it wouldn’t have played out the way it did without furious sweeping by George’s teammates.
“If they don’t sweep the heck out of that stone, we still don’t get that break, so I give all the credit to those guys,” George said.
A member of the bronze medal team at the Turin Games, Shuster moaned, “Are you kidding me?” as George’s lucky shot unfolded.
“He was trying to run his yellow guard straight back onto our red rock,” Shuster said. “There was no way it was going to hit our red rock, but he hit a yellow rock that was kind of right next to ours. It just touched their rock. He could hit a half-inch of that rock and it goes out of the four-foot (circle) because he threw so much weight at it. It happened to hit a sixteenth of an inch and drove it in. I don’t even know how you can explain that.”
Shuster’s team came back Friday night to defeat Todd Birr 10-4 and earn a rematch with George in today’s final. Patti Lank beat Amy Wright 6-5 and will play Debbie McCormick in today’s women’s final.
John Meyer: 303-954-1616 or jmeyer@denverpost.com
Curling Olympic Trials
Where: Broomfield Event Center
Today’s championship games: Women, 10 a.m.; Men, 3 p.m.
Tickets: $5-$20
