Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy– The Canadian player at the center of an escalating controversy at the Winter Olympics insisted on Saturday that he was not a cheater and suggested his team may have been the target of a “deliberate” attack by Sweden, one of its top gold medal rivals.
Mark Kennedy admitted he “probably could have handled it better” after he hurled expletives toward Swedish soccer player Oscar Eriksson, who he accused of breaking the rules by “double-touching” — essentially, touching the rock again after initially launching it down the ice sheet — during Canada’s 8-6 win in a quarterfinal match late Friday.
However, the 44-year-old Kennedy said he did not intentionally take to the ice “with the intent of gaining an advantage by cheating,” and never did.
Footage widely circulated online showed Kennedy violating curling rules by touching the granite stone with his outstretched finger after he had already released it. When asked about the footage, Kennedy said: “Yes, I’m not going there. I’ve never known that to be a concern before. It’s never been brought up in any conversation.”
“And if someone said to you, ‘Hey, do you double-touch all the time?’ Honestly, in that split second, I couldn’t even tell you if I was doing it or not.”
He added that he had his own theory, suggesting that the whole thing may have been a “deliberate plan to try to catch us.”
“They came up with a plan to catch the teams red-handed,” Kennedy said.
The saga has rocked the usually quiet world of curling, and it involves two teams that regularly play each other outside of the Olympics and are among the best in the game.
Kennedy received a verbal warning from governing body World Curling a day after a rowdy confrontation with the Swedish team when fingers were pointed and the Canadian swore repeatedly. He has not been formally accused of cheating by World Curling, which does not use video to review play.
The organization chose to deploy two officials to monitor how players launched their stones during the Saturday afternoon session in the men’s competition. In that session, Canada lost 9-5 to Switzerland, and Sweden beat China 6-4.
Afterward, Erickson said he “slept well, I’m not sure” — referring to Kennedy — and said he chose that moment to denounce Kennedy’s alleged rule violation because he had seen it happen in the past. Erickson said he notified officials in two previous incidents.
“We want to play a fair game, like you follow the rules,” Erickson said. “And if we see something that doesn’t follow the rules, we tell competitors or officials. This time we did both.”
The allegations kept coming.
During their match against Canada, the Swiss men’s team alerted the referees midway through the match that they suspected that a member of the Canadian team had again double-tapped, said Glenn Howard, coach of the Swiss national team.
Howard Kennedy, himself a famous and highly acclaimed curler.
“My whole career, I would have said, ‘Oh, that’s good’ if there was a minor infraction,” Howell said, and said he didn’t know what to make of this latest escalation.
In the opening minutes of Friday’s game, Sweden’s skip Niklas Edin informed officials of their complaints about Kennedy. An official then stayed at the pig line — the thick green line before which curlers must release the stone — for three parties to monitor Canada’s curlers and no violations were recorded, World Curling said Saturday.
Online footage showing Kennedy double-tapping the stone prompted some curling fans to question how the video was captured and point out that cameras are not usually stationed at the hog line.
A staffer at Swedish public broadcaster SVT said the channel obtained the footage because it moved its camera to the pigs’ line after Sweden raised concerns about the double tap early in the match. The camera operator stayed there until he was able to catch Kennedy’s pitch in the eighth end. Eriksson said that Swedish television showed him this footage.
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