Olympic curling tournament promises to serve up fascinating battles in Beijing

A unique winter sport that combines strategy and skill like no other, curling is primed to witness an intriguing clash of its traditional powers and ambitious challengers at Beijing 2022.

As the first sport to get underway, curling will set the tone for the rest of the Games. The action begins at the National Aquatics Center with mixed doubles round robin contests on Feb 2, two days before the opening ceremony at the nearby Bird's Nest stadium.

The 19-day curling program at Beijing 2022 will showcase the intense focus, precision, tactics and fitness needed to prevail in a game which has so much more to offer than at first meets they eye.

Often dubbed "chess on ice", the sport involves two teams sliding granite stones toward a target and looking to score points by landing the stones closest to the center through 10 ends (rounds), or eight ends for mixed doubles.

Sweden and Canada respectively top the men's and women's World Curling Federation rankings, and they enter the Games as the gold-medal favorites at the aquatics center, the 2008 Summer Games' swimming venue which has been transformed into a curling arena and temporarily renamed the "Ice Cube".

At the 2018 Winter Games in Pyeongchang, the Republic of Korea, Sweden claimed the women's gold and men's silver, while Canada won the mixed doubles in the event's Olympic debut. The United States won the men's gold.

Boasting a proud track record in the sport, and abundant facilities to maintain a steady flow of new talent, Sweden and Canada have collected a combined 18 medals at the Olympics out of total 42 up for grabs.

The Swedish men's team, led by double Olympic medalist Niklas Edin, arrives in Beijing as the world champion after claiming a third successive title in April in Calgary, Canada. It was Edin's fifth world title in total as the skip. The Swedes will look to finish a step higher on Beijing's podium than in Pyeongchang, where they had to settle for silver after losing to Team USA 10-7 in the final.

The defending champion Americans will be hoping to prove 2018 was not just a flash in the pan, while the Republic of Korea, Japan and Switzerland are also forces to be reckoned with.

On the women's side, reigning Olympic champion Swedish, led by skip Anna Hasselborg, is smarting from a disappointing fourth-place finish at the 2021 world championships, and in a wide-open Olympic tournament can expect stiff competition from world champion Switzerland, the US, the team representing the Russian Olympic Committee and Britain.

Hasselborg is the undisputed star of the show, with the 32-year-old Stockholm native entering the Beijing Games as the first curler in history to simultaneously hold the European, world mixed doubles and Olympic titles.

Led by young skip Han Yu, the host squad harbors hopes of returning to the sport's top echelon after enjoying some short-lived success over a decade ago when Team China won a world championship title in 2009 and an Olympic bronze medal the next year.

Although lacking the experience and finesse of their established opponents, Han's young team, with an average age of 23, took plenty of confidence from its convincing wins at the 2021 worlds, where they beat Hasselborg's Swedish team 7-5 and the 2018 Olympic bronze medalists Japan 5-2 in the round robin to eventually finish sixth.

"As a young team heading into the home Olympics, we have nothing to lose but to go all out in each of the games and leave no regrets on the ice," said Han.

In the mixed doubles, the British team of Jennifer Dodds and Bruce Mouat, who won the 2021 world championships representing Scotland, will join medal contenders Almida de Val and Oskar Eriksson of Sweden and Norwegian pair Kristin Skaslien and Magnus Nedregotten to challenge the Canadian pair of John Morris, the 2018 gold medalist, and his new partner Rachel Homan.

"Rachel and I have played a lot of mixed doubles together over the years with the dream of playing for Canada at the Olympics," said Morris. "We can't wait to get over there and give it our best. We know it's a tough field, but we've worked extremely hard this season and we'll be fighting hard for gold in Beijing."