Pilsen, Czech Republic
Saturday 9 December 2017
With a 9-3 win over Finland in Saturday (9 December) morning’s seventh and final session of women’s round-robin play at the Olympic Qualification Event 2017 in Pilsen, Czech Republic, Denmark became the third team to make it to the play-offs.
The play-offs will determine the two Member Associations to go forward to next February’s PyeongChang 2018 Olympic Winter Games.
The Danes started well – they were 3-0 up after three ends – and went on to dominate the game, before Finland conceded after eight ends. Denmark now join already-qualified China and Italy, who were both in action in the final session.
China beat Germany by 7-3, while Italy were involved in an extra-end tussle with Latvia that they won by 7-6. Italy’s skip Diana Gaspari played a perfectly-judged draw inside a Latvian stone near the button with the last stone of the game.
These results now put Italy in top spot in the women’s rankings, sharing the same won five, lost one record as China, but out-ranking them because they won the round-robin game between the two. On four wins and two losses are Denmark in third place.
Italy and China now face each other in the first play-off, with the winner gaining an Olympic place and the loser facing Denmark in a sudden-death second play-off for the last remaining Olympic place.
The next live games, on national broadcasters and World Curling TV (note geo-blocking applies), at this event will be Czech Republic v Netherlands and China v Russia men at 13:30, Central European Time (+1 hours, Greenwich Mean Time) on Saturday (9 December) afternoon.
These games will be followed by the women’s first qualification game at 19:00 (CET) – which will also be broadcast live – between Italy and China. The winner of this game will secure the first available place at the PyeongChang 2018 Olympic Winter Games
They said it
Madeleine Dupont; skip, Denmark (after 9-3 win over Finland): “I’m very happy and very relieved. This is more than any of us dared to hope for when we started. We thought China and Germany would be clear favourites, followed by Czech Republic, us and Italy – it could have gone either way for all five of us. We’re good when we have our backs to the wall and we have to win, that is something that characterises this team – we’ve never lost a game that we had to win. That’s one of our big strengths.”
Bingyu Wang; skip, China (after 7-3 win over Germany): “We just did our best [in this game]. Everyone wants to win that [next qualifying] game, but we will just play our way and focus on one rock and one end [at a time] and hopefully we will have a good finish.”
Women’s session seven results: Finland 3-9 Denmark; China 7-3 Germany; Italy 7-6 Latvia
Standings after women’s session seven (W-L):
P Italy 5-1
P China 5-1
P Denmark 4-2
Czech Republic 3-3
Latvia 2-4
Germany 2-4
Finland 0-6
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