A fight to the end, Team Homan heading home with Olympic bronze

Nothing came easy for Rachel Homan and Team Canada at Milano Cortina 2026.

The bronze medal match proved to be no different.

Canada’s women’s curling team, which also includes third Tracy Fleury, second Emma Miskew, lead Sarah Wilkes, and alternate Rachelle Brown, trailed the United States 3-2 entering the sixth end. A mistake by the Americans allowed Canada to steal three in the sixth only for the United States to score two in the seventh.

Canada picked up three again in the eighth, which proved to be critical with the Americans making it a one score game again in the ninth. But the Canadians held off the Americans in the 10th, adding two to make it a 10-7 final and winning Canada’s first women’s curling medal since Sochi 2014.

“I’m just so proud to be Canadian, to have the fight that we did this week and our story of how we got here and how we got an Olympic medal,” said Homan. “I’ll forever be proud of that.”

The team certainly showed plenty of fight just to put themselves in a position to medal at Milano Cortina 2026. Canada got off to a promising start, defeating Denmark 8-6 in their opening draw. But a 9-8 loss to the United States was the first of three straight defeats, putting the team’s medal hopes very much in doubt.

Just like in Saturday’s bronze medal win, Team Homan fought through some early challenges and closed out the round robin with five straight victories, securing a spot in the semifinals and guaranteeing them a chance to play for a medal. Canada fell 6-3 to Sweden in the semis, which setup a rematch with the Americans—this time with a bronze medal on the line.

“I’m sure that a lot of people probably wrote us off, but we were just trying to stay in the moment, try to win, and grind as much as we could, just grind for every inch, for each other, and we did that,” said Miskew.

“To come out at the end of this week with a medal, if someone had told me that last Saturday, we would have been pretty pumped.”

Homan has been one of the world’s most decorated skips over the past 15 years, winning medals at five different World Women’s Curling Championships since 2013, which includes three golds. But an Olympic medal had eluded her.

READ: Olympic bronze medal for Rachel Homan and Team Canada

At PyeongChang 2018, the Homan-led team of Miskew, Joanne Courtney and Lisa Weagle failed to make the playoff round, finishing sixth. At Beijing 2022, Homan teamed up with John Morris in mixed doubles, finishing fifth.

Eight years after her first Games, Homan now has her first Olympic medal.

“You prepare so much for the Olympics, and there’s so many stories here where they fought just as hard, and they didn’t come home with a medal. And I don’t think that matters,” said Homan.

“It’s your story and how hard you trained and fought, and your placement doesn’t really matter. It’s how you handle yourself in your sport and how you fight for your country. There’s just so much to be proud of, medal or not.

“The medal is just an unbelievable bonus. It doesn’t feel real that we are bringing home a medal for Canada. It’s just a really cool feeling.”

The current rendition of Team Homan has become a powerhouse. Wilkes teamed up with Homan and Miskew in 2020 while Fleury joined in 2022. The team went on to capture World Women’s Curling Championship titles in both 2024 and 2025.

While the team had already been through a lot together, the challenges they faced at Milano Cortina 2026 brought them even closer.

“I’m just so incredibly grateful for my teammates,” said Wilkes. “We all came together this week. It was a hard week. We got down early and it would have been easy to, you know, fold and just move on, but instead of that, we actually came closer together, supporting each other throughout it and really just grinded our way through every single game out there.”

This was the second Olympic Games for Miskew, who has been close friends with Homan since childhood. It was the first Olympic experience for Wilkes, Fleury and Brown.

“It’s such an incredible feeling,” Wilkes said about being an Olympic bronze medallist. “Of course you don’t want to focus on the outcome and the earning medals and all of that. You want to focus on the process on your way there. But for that process to be rewarded with an Olympic medal with this incredible group that we have here is just fantastic. It’s incredible and it just feels so rewarding.”