Canadian curling has risen to the top of the podium once again.

It’s been 12 years since Canada’s national anthem was played at the men’s competition, but the skip who heard it last, got to hear it again.

Brad Jacobs along with his teammates Marc Kennedy, Brett Gallant and Ben Hebert defeated Great Britain’s Team Bruce Mouat 9-6, in what some will call the greatest gold-medal match of all time, to become champion at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milano Cortina. 

With the win, Jacobs made history. He is now the first skip in men’s curling to win two Olympic gold medals.

“Can’t put it into words, really can’t. We play for each other. I play for my teammates, I’ve said that my whole career. It’s just an honour to skip this team,” Jacobs told CBC Olympics with the Canadian flag draped on his back.

In 2022, Jacobs was burnt out from the sport and wanted to step away from the game, but just one year later he came back to the game he loved to join Reid Carruthers from Manitoba. Together they reached the Brier but failed to reach the playoffs.

Jacobs decided to leave the team and immediately became the hottest free agent available before finding the team he is with now.

“I’m just proud of them. I’m proud of my guys, I’m proud of the way we were able to hang in there throughout that whole game. To see the looks on their faces at the end and celebrating that win is just special,” Jacobs said. 

Together, they’re now all Olympic champions. 

This was a game nobody deserved to lose based on how each team was playing. Unfortunately for Mouat and his world No. 1-ranked teammates Grant Hardie, Bobby Lammie and Hammy McMillan Jr., they will look back at the ninth end that seemingly decided the game for years. For now though, they are the Olympic silver medalists for the second Games in a row. 

The end that changed the game

Even though Canada was playing great up until the ninth end, Great Britain was playing that much better and felt in control of the scoreboard as they were up one. 

Nobody missed anything, the deciding factors were all in the rock placement, and the Brits were so precise Canada couldn’t match it.

The strategy in the ninth end was simple for Canada, either try to score three points or bail quickly and blank the end to take the hammer into the 10th where they could score two for the win.

Hebert set the end up great for Canada, before Lammie missed his first shot and rolled one of his own guards into the house. Gallant hit and Canada was sitting three. 

Lammie’s next shot would be the first of four double takeout attempts by the Brits that each just barely failed to connect.

With the game on the line and Canada sitting three with no easy double available, Mouat had to attempt a freeze. His rock placement was close to perfect but gave just enough of a gap for Jacobs to make the hit and score three, taking an 8-6 lead. 

If one of those four doubles connected for Great Britain, it would have been a different game. 

Coming into the game it was obvious that if Canada was going to have a chance to win the game, Jacobs was going to have to play as good, if not, better than Mouat. 

The other key position though, was third. Was 44-year-old Kennedy going to be able to keep up with Hardie?

Hardie started off incredible. He made a double takeout while rolling completely buried in the second end to set up Great Britain’s deuce to give them a 2-1 lead. 

The bar was set for Kennedy, and not only did he keep up, but he actually outcurled Hardie 93-86 per cent. One of Kennedy’s biggest shots came in the fifth end where he landed a runback double that, if not made, would’ve resulted in Great Britain earning a steal.

Again in the ninth end, after Hardie stuffed the double takeout, Kennedy made the perfect hit and roll to lay buried behind the corner guard and welcomed the reality Canada could hang three on the board. 

Homan’s ‘resilience’ earns them bronze medal

Jacobs wasn’t the only Canadian team to earn a curling medal on Saturday.

The Canadian women’s team made up of Rachel Homan, Tracy Fleury, Emma Miskew, Sarah Wilkes were bronze medalists after they beat the U.S. 10-7. It’s also the first women’s medal for Canadian curling since Jennifer Jones won the gold medal back in 2014.

In the first half, this was another great game. Both teams didn’t want to give up a massive score and forced the other to take one, giving the U.S. a 3-2 lead at the fifth-end break.

In the second half, however, the tone shifted. There was more risk involved and the Canadians upped their game to a level the Americans couldn’t match to score eight of their 10 points in three ends.

Afterwards, Homan felt gratitude. 

“One word has got to be proud. I’m proud to be Canadian, proud to be with the girls on my team, the support staff, the family that have helped us get to this moment, just unbelievably proud in every way,” Homan told CBC Olympics.

“Every event, every win, every loss, it sits differently, and you have those memories of that journey, and this journey it’s just an incredible, incredible journey for our team, how we fought through this entire week to get this bronze medal. A year ago, if you said I’d be this unbelievably proud for a bronze medal I wouldn’t have believed you, and I can say to my core this is the most proud I’ve been of this team, of our fight, wearing the maple leaf and fighting hard for our country.”

Even though the medal they wanted was gold based on what the team has accomplished over the last four years, they still will cherish this third place finish just as much.

“We put this team together four years ago with the goal to go to the Olympics, bring home a medal for Canada, and I’m just so proud of how we stuck together and were really resilient,” first-time Olympian Fleury told CBC Olympics.

Homan and her team struggled throughout the event to find the top form that we’ve seen from them at national and world championships, but even so, this team has so much to be proud of. 

They battled through a 1-3 start to take five straight must-win games and carry themselves to the playoffs just to be heartbroken in the semifinal.

But yet, in the bronze-medal match, they came together and collectively had their best performance of the week. 

There is one more game to wrap up the curling competition at the 2026 Winter Olympics, when Switzerland’s Team Silvana Tirinzoni will face Sweden’s Team Anna Hasselborg for the gold medal in the women’s discipline on Sunday at 5:05 a.m. ET/2:05 a.m. PT.