Great Britain’s wheelchair curlers concluded their calamitous Winter Paralympics campaign but vowed: ‘Our journey’s only just beginning.’
Hugh Nibloe and his Scottish rink endured a terrible time in Beijing as they slumped to six losses from their ten round robin matches.
Their hopes of advancing to a semi-final evaporated before Thursday’s final two clashes - where they recovered from a morning defeat against China to beat Latvia 8-4 - as they were unable to live up to the pre-Games promise of emulating ParalympicsGB’s brilliant bronze bagged at Sochi 2014.
Nibloe and veteran Gregor Ewan - part of the team in 2014 and at his third Games – were off the Paralympic pace while Games debutant David Melrose, 56, had to be rushed to hospital on a stretcher after falling out of his chair on the ice against Canada.
Meggan Dawson-Farrell, 29, did show some signs of sparkle and skip Nibloe, whose team only formed a matter of months ago, hopes her youthful enthusiasm can lay the foundations for a brighter future.
Asked if the Games can form the first step on the way to achieving something special, the 40-year-old from Stranraer said: “It could be.
“We’re a young and new team - a lot of the other teams have been together for years..
“If you want to be at the top you have to keep improving - hopefully we can continue to build unity and do well in the future.
“We’ve now got three more Paralympians after these games [Dawson-Farrell, Melrose and alternate Gary Smith] - that’s only going to add experience and we can now come back stronger in four years’ time.”
Britain just couldn’t find any consistency at the Ice Cube and were out-thought, out-manoeuvred and out-classed by their savvy opponents.
They repeatedly failed to land basic shots as defeats against Norway, Slovakia, Sweden, Canada and Korea proved fatal ahead of Thursday’s meaningless matches against the Latvians and Chinese.
And their Games were epitomised by the image of Melrose, 56, falling to the ice after reaching for his delivery stick and being forced off on a stretcher in Wednesday’s defeat to Canada.
Nibloe confirmed Melrose got the all clear and has now left hospital as the team prepare to return to the UK and pivot their attention towards next year’s World Championships and the Milan-Cortina Paralympic cycle.
Nibloe added: “We never had all four players playing well in the same game this week.
“Teams have punished us, whereas we’ve not been as good and clinical at punishing them.
“It wasn’t our week but we’ll be back in the future - we’ll be fighting and raring to go for the World Championships.”
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