This Skip Definitely Makes Others Hop

The 2002 Winter Olympics were good for Mirjam Ott. She was on the Swiss women’s curling team that won silver in Salt Lake City and the experience, she says, was “very nice.”

Two things could have been better.

Ott wanted gold. Just as important, she wanted to be the skip, the leader of the team.

Four years ago, she was playing third on Switzerland’s four-woman rink, as teams are called in this sport. Having spent most of her curling life skipping her own rinks, it didn’t feel quite right.

“She knows what she wants,” said Mario Gross, her coach. “Very demanding.”

Ott cringes at that description.

“No, no, that’s not true,” she said, then acknowledged, “If I have an aim, I know how to reach it.”

So after the 2002 Olympics, she decided to form her own rink. The 34-year-old from Flims gathered players from around the country, a sort of all-star collection of the best curlers she had faced in previous years.

“It was good to find people who thought the same as me,” she said.

Her coach translated: “It’s not easy to play for her.”

She is a compact woman, 5 feet 5, thin, with wavy hair and an alert manner. In Switzerland, she and teammate Binia Beeli own a marketing and event-planning business.

After a short get-acquainted period, Ott’s rink finished second in the European championships in 2004 and 2005. They qualified for the Turin Olympics by defeating her old skip, Luzia Ebnother.

“It was a new period you start,” Ott said. “I just thought we couldn’t reach any more with that old team.”

The decision to strike out on her own might have seemed questionable after a disappointing performance at the 2005 world championships, where her rink finished eighth.

But things are looking a lot better in Turin, where the Swiss team came through the round robin with a 7-2 record.

In the semifinals Wednesday, Ott and her teammates scored three in the third end -- a curling match has 10 ends, or innings -- and two in the eighth on the way to a 7-5 victory over Canada.

The Swiss won with better accuracy, scoring on 75% of their shots versus Canada’s 69%.

That puts Switzerland into today’s gold-medal game against Sweden, which defeated Norway.

“I think we have a tough game tomorrow,” Anette Norberg, the Swedish skip, said.

The teams know each other well. Sweden defeated Switzerland for last year’s European championship, 9-4.

This time, Ott said simply, “We have to play better.”

After four years of building a rink and pointing toward this match, she isn’t preoccupied with previous results.

“We have always believed in ourselves,” she said. “We know what we can do.”

Spoken like a woman in charge.