China wins 1st Olympic curling medal
Last Updated: Friday, February 26, 2010 | 4:08 PM ET
By Jesse Campigotto, CBC Sports
Chinese skip Wang Bingyu, right, considers strategy with teammate Liu Yin during the bronze-medal game. (Toshifumi Kitamura/AFP/Getty Images)Bingyu Wang overcame a Switzerland rally to skip China to the podium in its Olympic curling debut with a 12-6 win in Friday's bronze-medal game in Vancouver.
Wang, who last year won her country's first world championship in the sport, scored three in the first end and led 5-1 after three before Swiss skip Mirjam Ott tied it at 6-6 in the sixth. But China scored a pair in the seventh, and when Ott came up short of the house to surrender three more with the final stone of the eighth, the two-time defending silver medallist elected to concede.
"We just started thinking this is our last Olympic game and the last chance. We just want to show we can play well," Wang said.
"Now I think I can really relax. This is our first Olympic and we took the bronze medal."
Ott said she never recovered after allowing her opponent an open hit for a triple in the opening end.
"I know we have a good team, but we made a big mistake in the first," said Ott, who called her weak final draw attempt a "terrible rock."
Wang's meteoric rise in the world rankings has been helped by funding from the Chinese government, which pays her to curl as a full-time job. The 25-year-old from Harbin plays a full schedule of tournaments in North America, where she's better known as "Betty" by her peers on the World Curling Tour, and her rink is coached by Montreal-based Dan Rafael.
"I just waited all week for them to show up, and they did today," said Rafael, who criticized the team for a lack of passion after a round-robin loss to Russia "They did everything we told them to do and more.”
At her first world championship appearance in 2005, Wang skipped her team to a seventh-place finish. The next year she was fifth. After falling back to seventh in 2007, she took a surprise silver medal at the 2008 worlds in Vernon, B.C. Wang finished the job in 2009, winning gold in South Korea.
Wang's rink went 6-3 in the Olympic round robin, including a victory over Canada, then lost to Sweden in the semifinals.
The Chinese men's team skipped by Fengchun Wang missed the playoffs with a 2-7 record.
