Lisa Weagle and Jocelyn Peterman at the 2022 Olympics Closing Ceremony. (Curling Canada) 

By Alessia Proietti

Back home in Canada

‘Disneyland for athletes’: Red Deer’s Jocelyn Peterman’s Olympic experience

Feb 27, 2022 | 9:00 AM

She may be back on Canadian snow, but Olympic curler and Red Deer native Jocelyn Peterman is still feeling the ice of Beijing tingling under her feet.

“It’s been a bit of a whirlwind. It was a dream come true to be able to compete there. It was pretty surreal,” said Peterman about her first time ever participating in the Olympics.

Peterman described her journey as being filled with excitement, flying into Beijing, with her teammates: Skip Jennifer Jones, Kaitlyn Lawes (third), Dawn McEwen (lead), Lisa Weagle (fifth), and Coach Viktor Kjell. Although missing the opening ceremony, the team arrived a few days before the start of their competition.

“My team calls it the ‘Disneyland for athletes’. I thought that that was very overwhelming and exciting and then we took a couple of days to get into competition mode,” said the 28-year-old athlete.

Winning their first match against South Korea on Feb. 10 (12-7), they powered through some highs and lows landing them with a favorable score of 5-4 but a three-way tie with Great Britain and Japan.

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The driving force behind the team’s perseverance, Peterman says, was not only their belief in each other but ensuring they had fun playing the sport.

Ultimately it was the Draw Shot Challenge (DSC) that disqualified the team from the playoffs.

Used in the Olympics as a tie-breaker, the teams start each round robin game throughout the competition with a Last Stone Draw (LSD) determining who gets the hammer. Two players from each team curl a regular shot, one clockwise and one counter clockwise, measuring the distance from the center of the stone to the center point of the house. Once the distances of both shots are added, the team with the smallest combined distance wins the LSD. These measurements are added up after all nine round robin games, dropping the worst measurement to arrive at a DSC total. The smallest DSC total wins the tie-breaker.

In Canada’s case, they were in last place out of the 10 teams with the largest DSC score of 45.44 cm.

“We knew how important that draw of the button was so we practiced it a lot, a lot more than probably most teams would,” she said. “We didn’t have our best results at that so going into our last few games we knew we had to win.”

While not the ending Peterman and her team hoped for, she says every aspect of the experience was special, especially being a part of the closing ceremony for Team Canada, her most memorable part.

Team Canada Women’s Curling team at the 2022 Olympic Closing Ceremony (Curling Canada)
Top (left to right): Coach Viktor Kjell, Dawn McEwen. Bottom: Lisa Weagle, Jocelyn Peterman, Kaitlyn Lawes, Jennifer Jones

Now in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador with her fiancé Brett Gallant, also this year’s Olympic curler for the Canadian men’s team, Peterman is taking some well-deserved rest and recharge before jumping right back into practicing for her next competition.

But more importantly, she’s especially excited to fly back to Red Deer next week to visit her family and friends who she hasn’t seen since early December.

“I feel like I’m so far away from them but at the same time I feel like they’ve been with me the whole time,” she said.

Peterman’s time at the 2022 Winter Games may have just lit the torch of her Olympic career.

“Having been there and especially not totally achieving the goals we set, going to the next Olympics is for sure the goal. It’s four years away now and we’ve already set our sights on Italy,” said Peterman.

The 2026 Winter Olympics are scheduled to take place in the Italian cities of Milano and Cortina.

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