25 April 2024
Sweden’s World and Olympic Champions embrace home ice at World Senior Championships
While curling in general has a great sense of community, it could be argued that no World Curling competition is better at binding together its contestants as ‘one big family’ than the World Senior Championships.
Invariably, every game – hard-fought as it may have been – ends up with joint team photographs and lengthy post-game getting-to-know-you chats, which are either updates from previous years of head-to-head action or planting the seeds of new curling friendships.
This means that the World Senior Championships is one of the great levellers among competitors – sporting backgrounds, illustrious as they may be, don’t need to matter at all.
And that’s just as well, because this year’s World Seniors’ field features some real stars of the past, who are just content to be competitors of the present.
Take for example, the Swedish women’s team – skip Anette Norberg, third Cathrine Lindahl, second Susanne Patz, lead Anna Klange-Wikstroem and alternate Helene Lyxell.
In Anette and Cathrine, this team has two of the most successful international curlers ever. They are both double Olympic gold medallists (in Turin 2006 and Vancouver 2010) and they won two world titles and six European champions together. On top of that, their team were inducted into the World Curling Hall of Fame in 2021, among other honours and medals. Above that, Cathrine served as a World Curling Board member for several years once she retired from elite curling.
Perhaps after such a storied career, Anette and Cathrine would have had enough of competition? But no – “I still love to play curling” says Cathrine, who has the added bonus of playing in her hometown this week.
She adds, “Playing with Anette again is really nice.”
And even at this level, Cathrine and Anette have had to work hard to make it to this event.
Cathrine explains, “This is my first time at seniors – it’s been a goal for me to play in seniors, it seems like so much fun. I’ve tried three times at the national championships, and this was the first time I’d won.”
Cathrine is clear about why she remains involved and why senior curling is so important.
“I think the biggest thing about curling is the friendship and the community. And also that you can still be competitive at this age. It’s a real family thing, too. We have a family team – me and my daughter and Anette and her daughter. There are still many good things.”
And yet, even at this level and after all these years, there is a new experience at this event for Cathrine.
Because of earlier commitments, regular skip Anette has had to leave the other members of her team to play out the rest of the competition and, for the first time in a long time, Cathrine finds herself playing at skip at an important event.
And, summing up her experience so far, she says, “My message is just to have fun, and if you have fun, it will go well, that’s the most important thing.”
