Eve Muirhead ready to embark on Olympic gold quest

NEXT stop Sochi. There is still almost a year to go before the Winter Olympics, but after becoming world champions for the first time on Sunday, Eve Muirhead and her team now have their sights firmly set on Russian gold.

A world silver medallist in 2010, the 22-year-old Scot competed at the Olympic Games for the first time that same year. It was more about experience that time, as her rink failed to reach the semi-finals. Next year will be about victory.

So far, thanks to their performance in the world championships in the Latvian capital of Riga, Muirhead and her team-mates – Anna Sloan, Vicki Adams, Claire Hamilton and alternate Lauren Gray – have only ensured that Great Britain will have a place in the competition in Sochi next year. Who actually represents the country will be decided by the selectors.

But, after performing so well, Muirhead is all but sure that she and her successful rink will be the chosen ones.

“I guess that was our first goal going out to the World Championships, to secure the Olympic spot,” she said yesterday after arriving back at Edinburgh Airport. “I like to think we’re 99.99 per cent sure now.

“Last week sealed up a lot of things – that’s our funding sealed up, as well as Great Britain’s Olympic spot. And hopefully that’s the Olympic team sealed up too. The coaches decide, but I would like to think so, definitely.”

Once that selection is formalised, Muirhead and team can begin to plan for Sochi. They know now that on their day they are the best in the world, but are aware that there is a lot of hard work to be done if they are to replicate that success. “It’s made us all feel like we know we can win these major championships now. I came away with the silver in 2010, and I definitely didn’t want to come away with silver again. So to make it one better was perfect. Winning showed we had trained so hard for this championship and this season. It’s great when it finally pays off, all these hours in the gym and all these hours on the ice every single day. When you get the reward at the end of it, it is nice and sweet.

“We’ve got one more tournament in Canada in a couple of weeks, then the summer. Then we’ll train really hard again – even harder, probably. We’re still not ahead of the rest. But we’ve definitely put down a marker.”

They did things the hard way in Riga, losing to Sweden twice – first in the round robin and then in the page one semi-final – before triumphing over the same opponents in the final. The four-time world junior champion said that the Swedes had “played great” in the final before going down 6-5, but admitted she was always confident that she would be able to handle the pressure better than her opponents. “The Swedish team are a very strong round-robin team – they always start off the week really strongly, and we don’t have a very good record against them in the round-robin stages. But when it comes to the play-off stages, I would say that Sweden are a different team. Especially that skip. I think she has a collection of about eight silver medals, and under pressure she just seems to crumble.”

Muirhead, by contrast, seems to respond to pressure merely by playing better. “I guess that’s the good thing,” she continued. “If you crumble under pressure you’re not going to get too far. It’s quite a good thing to have, and I managed to stay calm and perform well. It’s definitely something that comes with experience, having been to several major championships before. And I guess what’s helped me as well is losing. If you lose, you learn a lot from it. I learned so much from the world final I lost”

For Sloan, too, the key to winning the final was to stay calm and refuse to let the pressure get to her. “We just needed to take it as any other game,” she said. “You can’t make it a bigger deal – we play our best when we’re just relaxed. We knew that it didn’t really matter about the two times they’d beaten us before, because when it comes to the final it’s an absolutely whole different ball game. It’s just who can handle the pressure, really.

“We knew that if we played the way we’d been playing, then we would get the win.

“It’s just amazing. It’s just not sunk in yet, to be honest. This has been a huge stepping stone for us.

“Lauren was in the world junior championships in Sochi and from what I heard that was an amazing event. I think Russia will make sure that no expense is spared, and I think it’s going to be amazing. We want that Olympic gold, and we’re not going to stop until we get it.”