Team Canada Sochi 2014 Blog: Ryan Harnden

By Ryan Harnden (Team Canada lead) — We knew it would be an intense night at the Ice Cube, and, yeah, the crowd was crazy. They cheered when you missed, and when they made shots, they cheered even louder. I was expecting them to cheer when I threw it through in the 10^th end, but it didn’t happen. I think they’re starting to catch on to the game. But in all honesty, it was so loud that we always had to be looking up and looking for Brad’s mouth or his hand motions. It was pretty tough. But we expected it. Rick Lang and Paul Webster did some scouting during the afternoon game when the women were playing and told us what to expect, and the fans did exactly what they said they would. It wasn’t anything surprising to us; we knew coming in that they were going to be loud. The guys did a good job of preparing us for that game. We all played well that game, which was good to see. Everything was on target — our weight judgment, our shotmaking, our line-calling. It’s good to be back, and we’re going to build off that. We had a good meeting before the game and we watched a video that TSN made for us after the Trials, and that kind of got us going for tonight. You saw a few fist pumps tonight when we made that shot for four — I think our intensity and killer instinct was back tonight. That stuff is really important to us. That’s our game, that’s who we are. We weren’t doing that the first three games here in Sochi — you didn’t see that emotion coming out that we usually display. To have it back tonight, and to be focused and into the game, it was good to see. We actually slept in a little bit today; we all woke up around 11, relaxed, watched some curling on TV, ate some lunch and then went over and played some ping pong for around an hour. Ryan Fry and I are pretty dominant right now. We’ve been dominating the other three guys — our win streak is pretty good right now. My serve is pretty deadly right now; I always stick it in the back corner. But all five of us are starting to get good at it because we’re playing so much. We have thrown out the challenge to the rest of the Canadian Olympic team, but the first night we got beat by girls. The Canadian women’s hockey team beat us pretty bad, but to their credit, one of their girls is a phenomenal ping pong player. We’re definitely looking for a rematch. We’ll be cheering for Jennifer and the girls to make it four straight wins tomorrow morning against Denmark, and then we’ll be back on the ice in the afternoon against the Danish men’s team. You can watch the game at 5 a.m. Eastern time on TSN2. (This is part of our series of athlete blogs from the Winter Olympics in Sochi; this story will be posted in French at www.curling.ca/fr/ as soon as possible)