Canada seeking revenge and redemption in men’s curling semifinal at Milano Cortina 2026
Brad Jacobs and Team Canada will have about seven hours to regroup, figure out what went wrong this morning and how to flip the result when they meet Norway in one semifinal in men’s curling at Milano Cortina 2026.
Canada fell behind Norway 5-1 after three ends Thursday morning, regained some momentum to make it interesting in the later ends, but still lost 8-6. The win allowed Magnus Ramsfjell and his team to make the playoffs and set up the rematch with Jacobs Thursday evening.
The other semifinal will see Switzerland’s Yannick Schwaller, who finished the round robin at 9-0, play Great Britain’s Bruce Mouat. That will be a meeting of the two top men’s teams in world rankings. Mouat, the No. 1 team in the world who struggled to a 5-4 round-robin record, made the playoffs when Switzerland beat Italy’s Joel Retornaz 9-5 in the final draw.
“We want revenge, we really do,” Jacobs said after the morning loss. “And want to redeem ourselves. That wasn’t our best performance by a long shot. We can play a lot better than that. More than anything, we play great for each other on this team and you’re going to see that tonight.”
Norway jumped off to a confidence-building start, turning a potential Canadian steal into a score of three in the first end. Ramsfjell’s angled raise takeout of the lone Canadian stone in the house gave Norway a quick 3-0 lead.
Taking advantage of key Canadian misses and timely Norway double takeouts, Ramsfjell forced Canada into singles in the second and fourth ends while scoring deuces with last rock in the second and fifth to build a five-point margin.
At the break Norway was only outshooting Canada 82 to 78 but Ramsfjell was shooting at 89 percent efficiency on take-outs compared to a surprisingly low 63 percent by Jacobs.
Canada capitalized on three consecutive misses in the sixth end to score three and put some pressure on Norway that had to win to make the playoffs. Ramsfjell allowed Canada to steal one in seven when his attempted double take-out was only half successful.
The Norwegians took one in the eighth and after Canada blanked the ninth, Ramsfjell completed the win by running Canada out of stones in the tenth.
In two other games to complete the ten-team round robin, Czechia (Lukas Klima) beat Sweden (Niklas Edin) 10-4 and Germany (Marc Muskatewitz) defeated China (Xu Xiaoming) 6-4.
The final standings saw Switzerland finish at 9-0 followed by Canada 7-2, Great Britain and Norway 5-4, Italy, Germany and the United States (Daniel Casper) 4-5, Czechia 3-6 and China and Sweden 2-7.
The bronze medal game is set for Friday and the gold medal match Saturday, both starting at 1 p.m., ET.