Canada-GB Showdown: Jacobs to meet top-ranked Mouat for men’s curling gold at Games

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This article was published 20/02/2026 (206 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

CORTINA D’AMPEZZO – The Canadian men’s curling team has about a dozen reminder messages stuck to the wall in the locker-room area at Cortina Curling Olympic Stadium.

Skip Brad Jacobs, vice Marc Kennedy, second Brett Gallant and lead Ben Hebert started the season with seven or eight notes and have added to them throughout the campaign.

At the top of the list: ‘Be a Great Teammate.”

“We’re just focused on not really worrying about the outcome,” said Canadian coach Paul Webster. “We talk about all these standards of play that we have.”

The veteran foursome has delivered so far at the Milan Cortina Games. A semifinal win over Norway on Thursday after an 8-1 round-robin set up the Canadians for a gold-medal showdown with Great Britain’s Bruce Mouat on Saturday.

“We had three of the best five teams in the world in the top four here this week,” Webster said. “It says a lot about the preparation of all the teams and we’re excited to play.”

Mouat’s top-ranked side had some challenges in round-robin play, needing a 9-2 win over American Daniel Casper in the final session to nab the fourth and final playoff berth at 5-4.

Great Britain followed that up by handing Switzerland’s Yannick Schwaller his first loss of the competition. An 8-5 semifinal win secured a berth against the fifth-ranked Canadians.

“We play well when it matters, that’s the belief that we have in this team,” Mouat said. “We’ve done it at world championships, we’ve done it at numerous competitions throughout our careers.”

Mouat reached the Olympic final in Beijing four years ago but lost to Sweden’s Niklas Edin. The 31-year-old Scot won a world title the next year and took world gold again in 2025.

“We’d love to beat them in the final,” Webster said. ‘That’s our goal. We want to get to the gold-medal final and play the best teams.”

Canada got to the championship by outscoring its opposition 68-49 on the week, with the lone hiccup a 9-5 loss to Switzerland.

Gallant has shown no signs of fatigue after playing mixed doubles earlier in the Games, and Kennedy has seemed unfazed after his profanity-laced argument with Sweden’s Oskar Eriksson a week earlier went viral.

The interaction kick-started a discussion about ‘double-touching’ rocks and umpire roles that finally died down a few days ago after making international headlines.

All four Canadians have been on the Olympic podium before. Hebert and Kennedy won gold in 2010, four years before Jacobs did the same. Gallant earned bronze in 2022.

Canada is playing like an experienced team that’s ready to embrace everything that comes with performing on the sport’s biggest stage.

“They’ve earned the right to be in that gold-medal game,” Webster said. “They’ve worked their asses off.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 20, 2026.