Who will win the Canadian curling trials?

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One of the biggest events in the run-up to the Winter Olympics begins this weekend as the Canadian curling trials get underway in Halifax.

Eight of the top men's teams and eight of the top women's teams in the country will compete for the chance to represent Canada in the four-player curling events this February in northern Italy. Canada's entry for the mixed doubles event was decided last season when the married couple of Jocelyn Peterman and Brett Gallant won their trials and then clinched an Olympic spot for Canada with their sixth-place finish at the world championships. 

The men's and women's trials both open on Saturday at the same arena and follow the same format. They start with a round robin where all the teams play each other once. The team with the best record advances directly to the final, while the second- and third-place teams meet in a semifinal next Thursday to decide who will face the No. 1 seed.

In a change from previous trials, the final is a best-of-three series rather than a single game. Both finals will be played next Friday and Saturday, with the rubber matches on the Sunday if necessary.

Whoever survives this gauntlet will be tasked with restoring Canada's faded reputation in Olympic curling. Since Brad Jacobs and Jennifer Jones swept the men's and women's golds at the 2014 Games in Russia, Canada has earned just one medal in the four-person events — a bronze by Brad Gushue in 2022.

Worse, half of Canada's Olympic quartets over that time span missed the playoffs, and not for a lack of star power. The four skips who represented Canada at the 2018 and 2022 Games — Gushue, Jones, Rachel Homan and Kevin Koe — own a combined 21 national championships and eight world titles.

Meanwhile, Canada's track record in the newer discipline of mixed doubles has been, well, mixed. Kaitlyn Lawes and John Morris won gold in the inaugural Olympic tournament in 2018, but Morris and Homan missed the playoffs in 2022.

So, who will wear the maple leaf in Italy this February? To help answer that question, we asked our friends at Shoreview Sports Analytics to crunch the numbers and find out which teams are most likely to win a ticket to the Olympics.

As Shoreview's Mike Heenan explains it, his firm produced a statistical rating for each team using what's known as the Bradley-Terry model, which estimates each team's underlying strength based on pairwise comparisons — in other words, who would beat who in individual matchups. The model puts the highest weight on the most recent results, with the weight of each game decreasing until it falls out of consideration after two years. Using those ratings, Shoreview simulated the men's and women's trials 10,000 times and looked at all of those simulations to see how often each team finished in each position.

Now let's take a look at both tournaments.

Women's

You don't need a fancy statistical model to tell you that Rachel Homan is a huge favourite to win this event.

The 36-year-old skip and her teammates Tracy Fleury, Emma Miskew and Sarah Wilkes are the undisputed queens of global women's curling, winning back-to-back world championships in 2024 and 2025. Last season, they won better than 90 per cent of their games, captured two Grand Slam titles and reached the final of the other three Slams. So far this season, they've won all three Slams.