The hardest loss in curling: Inside the grief of losing a Montana’s Canadian Trials final

Her emotions could be felt through the screen. Christina Black had just carried an underdog run to the brink of an Olympic berth, only to see it end against Rachel Homan in the 2025 Montana’s Canadian Curling Trials final on her home turf in Halifax, N.S. As the camera settled on Black for her post-game interview — Team Homan celebrating just out of frame — close observers could see she was fighting tears.

For many inside curling, it was a moment they immediately recognized. 

“Even now, when I watch a big game, my heart goes to the losers. I watch them first, before I watch the winners. I think when most people watch sports, they’re drawn to the winning team. Even now, it’s changed the way I look at sport,” said Amy Nixon, whose team, skipped by Shannon Kleibrink,  lost the Trials final in 2009 to Cheryl Bernard on the last rock. 

“I have a deep empathy for how crushing it is,” she said. “I just know it’s very hard and it’s not going to be easily worked through.”

In curling, there are many ways to lose. Few carry the weight of missing a chance at the Winter Games. For those who’ve experienced it, finishing out the rest of the season — and sometimes even continuing with curling altogether — can become a genuine struggle.

The hardest loss in Canadian curling

When Beth Iskiw thinks about the years she spent chasing her Olympic dream, what comes to mind isn’t a single shot or game; it’s the uniform she didn’t get to wear.

Because the turnaround between Montana’s Trials and the Games is so tight, logistics like ordering uniforms are taken care of months in advance for all Olympic hopefuls. “Before Trials you go online and pick your sizes at Lululemon,” Iskiw said, noting that athletes also fulfill drug testing requirements and start receiving emails from the Canadian Olympic Committee in preparation. Iskiw competed in the Montana’s Trials four times in her curling career — as a player, fifth and coach. She has also made six Scotties Tournament of Hearts appearances, winning in 2012 as third for Heather Nedohin’s rink and going on to win bronze at the world championship.

“You are living as if you’re an Olympic athlete. All that prep work. When you don’t win the Trials, bam, it’s gone,” she said.

The letdown that follows can be among the most intense in elite sport — and among the least understood. “Losing the Olympic Trials final in Canada is for sure the worst game to lose. The only thing that was harder and worse in my life than losing that game was my mom being in intensive care after brain surgery,” said Nixon, who has also been on the other side of the equation — she won the Montana’s Trials in 2005 as third for Shannon Kleibrink to go to the 2006 Torino Games. “I think that it sounds to the average person a little bit bananas, but it was huge grief.” 

Part of what makes the loss so hard is the belief required just to arrive at Montana’s Trials ready to contend. “To win, you have to believe. Teams have invested and sacrificed, and they have had to convince themselves that they will stand on the top of that podium.” Nixon said. 

For most teams, that belief is built through years of logistical and personal sacrifice — arranging childcare, managing careers and finding a version of family life that fits around a four-year Olympic cycle. Achieving podium results requires exposing yourself to the possibility of not achieving your goal, and that can be painful.

“Everybody thinks about the on-ice practice. You’re on the ice probably four or five times a week. Not including bonspiels. But I’m not even talking about that, I’m talking about how that goal becomes a constant thought. You structure your entire life around it,” Iskiw said.

At Trials, athletes are buoyed by the very real possibility that any team on a hot streak could win it all. “Everybody competing at Trials really feels you have a legit shot,” Iskiw said. “If you have a decent week and your team plays to their capabilities, you could win this.”

With every end, the stakes are unmistakable. “There’s a tension at Trials and even the crowd feels it,” she said. “You don’t want people to miss because you know how big the misses are. Even when I watch now, I’m sick to my stomach with some of those games or the misses, because it is so heartbreaking.”

When those misses add up and turn into losses, the comedown is swift. Despite the resources in place for carded and high-performance athletes, the recovery is challenging.

“Even though they prep you for it, it is worse than you think it’s going to be,” Iskiw said. “I didn’t know where to put my motivation all of a sudden. It is really depressing. Really sad. And then you want to be excited for the Olympics, and you want to support the team who goes, but you cry every time you see an athlete on the podium, thinking, ‘I was that close.’”

Working through grief

When Sherry Middaugh dropped Tracy Fleury off at the Saskatoon airport in 2021 after the skip lost in the Montana’s Trials final to Jennifer Jones, Fleury had one question: “How do you get over this?”

Middaugh, who coached Team Fleury throughout the Trials, already knew the answer. She had lived it herself — losing the 2013 Canadian Trials final to Jennifer Jones as the skip of her own rink. 

Her response to Fleury was simple: “You don’t.”

“Even watching the Trials now, you kind of still feel that down moment instead of something joyful,” Middaugh said. “It’s hard to say when you actually get over it. I don’t know if you ever do. It certainly doesn’t soften your passion, your love and your competitiveness. But, it’s more like a regret. What could have been eats away a bit at the confidence.” 

That hasn’t kept Middaugh off the ice. Earlier this year she added a Canadian title – and an upcoming world championship appearance – to her resumé. Middaugh led Ontario to gold at the 2025 Canadian Senior Curling Championships and will represent Canada at worlds in April 2026.

A similar feeling also nags at Iskiw. “Whenever someone introduces me as a Scotties champion to people who don’t know curling, the person they’re introducing me to will say something like, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s amazing. Have you ever gone to the Olympics?’ It’s always the follow-up. You could be a world champion and one of the best curlers, but people will always ask you.”

If the loss never fully disappears, the question becomes not how to get over it — but how to live with it.

The first decision for many teams is how to approach the Scotties Tournament of Hearts, which falls just a few months after their worst heartbreak. “The last place you want to be is a curling club right after that,” said Middaugh, who explained that her team crafted a simple explanation to shut down further discussion about their Trials experience with media and supporters. 

“You basically have to lean on your team members, because they’re going through the same thing,” Middaugh said. 

Iskiw’s process looked different. After losing in 2013, her team struggled in Scotties playdowns and didn’t advance. “I felt pretty horrendous all the time,” she said. 

Her solution: “After Trials, I needed a dog,” she said. It took a few years before she moved forward with the puppy plans, but now has a cavapoo named Charlie who can be traced directly back to that yearning. She took a full year off curling before deciding to move into coaching. 

“I just thought, what a waste of so much of my life to not continue,” she said. “With coaching, I started looking at things from a different lens. I realized how much I had to learn. There are all these other things I never knew because I wasn’t in that space of evaluating athletes.” Iskiw currently coaches Team Myla Plett. Her daughter, Allie Iskiw, plays lead for the team, who will be representing Canada at the World Junior Curling Championships in Tårnby, Denmark, Feb. 24 – March 6, 2026. 

For Iskiw, the dream hasn’t died. “I would love to go to the Olympics someday,” she said. “I still am someone who holds on to that hope that someday I could, as a support person in some capacity. When you’re a high-level athlete and the Olympics is the pinnacle, you just want to experience what that’s like.” Iskiw’s former skip, Heather Nedohin, will be coaching Team Homan in Cortina. 

There is no single way through it — and no fixed timeline. While Curling Canada provides high-performance athletes with resources to manage the ups and downs of competition, the process is personal. For every athlete who eventually finds their footing again, there is first a stretch of uncertainty, where the future of their curling life isn’t yet clear. For those who do navigate the grief and remain in the sport, it’s usually because of something similar to what Nixon experienced in the years after her loss.

She also took some time off from the sport before entering the 2010 Nanton Mixed Meat Spiel in Alberta, with her husband and some friends. 

They won. The prize was half a cow. Her husband doesn’t eat beef. 

“We had a blast,” Nixon said. It reminded her about why she got on the ice in the first place. 

Now, she watches her daughter curl every week. “They go upstairs for half an hour at the end, get their pitchers of pop, put two tables together, and do the social thing. That’s what has continuously brought me back to the game,” she said. “Curling can be beautiful, and the curling community can be beautiful, and the power of curling can be beautiful.”

Jolene Latimer is a member of the Women in Curling executive.