MILAN (AP) — The Canadian Olympic Committee’s chief executive said Sunday that the double-touch scandal plaguing Canada’s curling team is like “a foot blunder in tennis or a foot blunder in basketball.”
A day after the Canadian men’s team overturned cheating accusations and won gold at the Cortina Games in Milan, The Associated Press asked committee secretary-general David Shoemaker about the controversy.
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He said it was “not cheating.”
“To me, it’s like a foot error in tennis or a foot error in basketball,” Shoemaker added. “I wouldn’t say LeBron James is a liar if he takes four steps on his way to a layup.
“I understand the anger that has erupted on social media but some of this is unfair and hopefully we can see this go away.”
While tennis and basketball have referees who adjudicate foot errors, curling is mostly self-refereeed. So the sport was thrown into disarray during the round-robin phase when Sweden’s Oskar Eriksson accused Canada’s vice-captain Mark Kennedy of touching the rock again after initially releasing it from the ice. Kennedy responded with an expletive-laden outburst.
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“Mark Kennedy may regret his choice of words,” Shoemaker said. “He would find a time and a place to express that emotion, and not just the emotion he shared privately with his teammates, his family and the rest of us.”
Video circulating online appears to show Kennedy touching the granite stone with his outstretched finger after releasing it.
Kennedy received a verbal warning from curling’s world governing body the day after his altercation with Sweden, in which the Canadian player was pointed at and cursed multiple times.
After winning the gold medal, Kennedy said he didn’t know if “people will understand what we went through as a team this week — what I put them through as a team this week.
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“I let my emotions get the better of me,” Kennedy added. “I stood up for my teammates. I never back down. We kept going, we kept going, we did some amazing things that a weaker team could have lost miserably.”
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Dampf reported from Cortina d’Ampezzo.
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AP Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/milan-cortina-2026-winter-olympics
