Sweeping romance: the married couples of Cortina’s Winter Olympic curling rink

Partners on and off the ice talk about the tensions and joys of competing alongside the ones they love at the Winter Olympics

Every Olympics has its love stories. Usually, they’re all about the quantities of free prophylactics being handed out in the athletes’ village (this year’s edition has an image of the Olympic mascots, the friendly stoats Milo and Tina, on the box). But you have to look a little harder to find the great romances of these Games, which have been on the ice rink in Cortina, where, for the large part of the past week, a trio of married couples were competing against each other in the mixed doubles curling. It is essentially a competitive lovers’ stress test held in front of a live audience.

It’s a peculiarity of the Winter Olympics that there are so many partners partnering with each other in different events. There were two in the ice dancing: the US pair of Madison Chock and Evan Bates won silver and the Italians Marco Fabbri and Charlène Guignard came fourth. Which is all very well. But if you want to see a relationship you can actually relate to, curling was the sport to watch. It’s as if they made an Olympic event out of sharing the front of the car with your partner on a road trip with a map and no satnav.

It is easy when you’re winning, but it’s when the games start to turn that things get really interesting, especially when so much of the sport involves watching the competitors shout at each other about what shot to play next from opposite ends of 140ft of ice. “Hack weight! Half a broom inside!” “What?” “I said, ‘Hack weight! Half a broom inside!’” “Huh?” “HACK WEIGHT! HALF A BROOM INSIDE!”

“The married couples?” says the British curler Bruce Mouat with a grimace. “I mean, personally, I don’t think I would want to play with my partner.” Mixed doubles demands a lot of quick decision-making, trust, teamwork, and an ability to immediately forgive your playing partner for failing to do whatever it is the two of you just agreed they ought to. Mouat has been friends with his playing partner, Jennifer Dodds, since they were little kids, and they both say that much as they like sharing the ice they’re delighted they don’t have to go home together at the end of the day too.

“It definitely makes the tension higher,” says Norway’s Magnus Nedregotten, who plays with his wife, Kristin Skaslien. Nedregotten and Skaslien have already won two Olympic medals, but this year they were knocked out of the competition during the round robin. “Speaking for myself I actually think that’s one of the reasons why we fell short in a couple of games this Olympics,” he says, “because you know that if you make a bad shot now it’s not only yourself you’re letting down, it’s also your best friend, and your life partner.”

This may or may not have been what Skaslien was telling him when she was photographed brandishing the rubber grip from one of her curling shoes after one of the ends they lost. More often though, you see the two of them discreetly squeezing each other’s hands while they think no one’s looking.

Last Sunday, Nedregotten and Skaslien knocked another of the competition’s married couples out when they beat the Canadian pair of Brett Gallant and Jocelyn Peterman, who have the habit of using their brooms to pat each other on the bum. Then the next day the Canadians themselves knocked out the other married couple, Yannick Schwaller and Briar Schwaller-Hürlimann, when they beat them 8-4.

Nedregotten and Skaslien started dating after they met at a party thrown by the national curling association, and then became a mixed doubles team afterwards. Gallant and Peterman did it they other way around. They became partners on the ice when they teamed up to try to qualify for the Pyeongchang Olympics in 2018, then started dating afterwards.

“This is a full circle event for us,” Gallant says. “Mixed doubles was really what brought our family together, and you know we’ve been living together and training together for four years now. We have a son and juggle being parents with trying to be elite athletes. Anyone who has young kids knows it’s a lot of hard work.” It was hard to find a time to talk to Peterman when she wasn’t too upset about the defeat to speak.

“I think we’ve put a lot of work into it, relationships and team dynamics are very similar,” Peterman says after apologising, unnecessarily, for crying, “and we put a lot of work into that, into trying to understand each other, and understand what each other needs, and just trying to be that person for each other on the ice and off the ice.” Gallant is staying on to play in the men’s tournament, but Peterman is not on the women’s curling team, so her Olympics is over, and she has to move out of their room in the athletes’ village.

“We knew going into this week Brett was going to have to move on quickly, and get into game mode, so that’s the plan,” she says. “I have lots of other support and family here, Brett just has to flick the switch and be ready to give it his all.”

“It helps in a way that you both know what each other are feeling,” says Gallant. “There’s no guessing how much it hurts, or how much it stings. You know, it’s a sad hug at the end of the day, because you’re both going through that disappointment, but we always have each other. I saw first-hand how much work Jocelyn puts in and how hard she fights. Even though it hurts in this moment, I wouldn’t have changed anything along the journey we’ve had.”