As he admitted that his team’s hopes of winning a medal in Beijing had ended with their fifth loss of the competition, ParalympicsGB curling skip Hugh Nibloe vowed to come back fighting at future events as he reflected on the outcome.
While admitting to some frustration following the 8-6 defeat to Korea which left them in ninth place in the table, on a record of three wins and five losses, the two-time Paralympian believes that the relatively inexperienced British squad will learn from their experience in Beijing’s Ice Cube and will benefit from it.
“We’ve no chance now, which is disappointing. It’s not what we came here for, being out so early,” said Nibloe. 
“We just gave ourselves too many mountains to climb and couldn’t overcome them, so it’s going to be two games tomorrow that we want to try and win and finish on a high, then get back home. We’ll see what we can do tomorrow and go from there.
“It’s really frustrating. I thought we were really well prepared coming out. We’d had a good camp, but maybe not having the opportunity to travel as much over the last few years and get a lot of games under our belts didn’t serve us well in the end.
“Inconsistency has just absolutely bitten us this week. I don’t think we’ve ever had all four players playing well in the same game. At times we were even struggling to get three of us playing well at the same time, so that’s something we’ll go back and reflect on and see how we can improve it in the future.”
Knowing they had to win to have any chance of reaching the semi-finals, Nibloe and teammates Gregor Ewan, Gary Smith and Meggan Dawson-Farrell, were in trouble from the opening end when they conceded a three, but battled gamely to take the match to the final end where they put opposing skip Jaehyuk Jang under huge pressure, only for the Korean skip to produce a perfect raise to promote a stone onto the edge of the button under considerable cover.
Ewan, who played skip stones for the British team throughout the week, then made a high tariff attempt to promote a guard onto two more British stones inside the four foot in a bid to turn things around, but when he narrowly missed the match was over. 
“We’d looked at a few options, but we couldn’t cover everything, so we left their skip what we thought was the hardest shot for him and he made it, fair play to him,” said Nibloe.
“It was a tough shot and he pulled it off. That’s just the way curling goes sometimes. He left Gregor with an awful shot to have to play with his last and he wasn’t that far away from making it. Curling’s just that game of inches… 45 metres but it all comes down to an inch or two.”
Alternate Smith had made his first start of the match, having come into the team earlier in the day when David Melrose suffered a fall from his chair and had to be stretchered from the arena during the team’s defeat by Canada.
While that had clearly unsettled his teammates during that match, Nibloe was not prepared to use it as any sort of excuse for their performance against Korea. by which time they knew Melrose was leaving hospital and returning to the athlete accommodation following scans which showed a rotator cuff injury.
“David’s reasonably good,” he said.
“He’s on his way back to the village tonight, so we’ll see him when we get back. That’ll be good. It’s great to hear that he’s coming back and he’s not had to stay in hospital overnight. 
“When we went on the ice against Korea we were all aware that he was going to be all right and things were going to be fine, so I don’t think we can put anything down to that.
“It maybe affected us a bit in the Canada game, but against Korea we just got off to a bad, slow start and we nearly got it back, but not quite. If you give away a three at this level you’re in trouble.”
The British team is also determined to give its all in their final two matches against hosts China, who are now joint top of the standings with Sweden and Latvia, who also remain in play-off contention.
“It’s only respectful to every other team that you give the same level that you have against every other team in the round-robin,” said Nibloe.
“For the integrity of the competition you don’t want to give up or lie down to anyone and for our own personal pride it would be nice to get another couple of wins.”
And he is confident that there is much more to come from them in future.
“As a team we’re quite young,” said their skip.
“A lot of the other teams have played together for years and years and years, where we’re quite new together.
“It’s half the team’s first Paralympic Games, so we were maybe lacking that bit of experience and got off to a slow start. Other teams have punished us and we’ve not been as clinical in punishing other teams, but we’ll be back again in the future and it’s not the end of the world.”
While the forthcoming weekend was not what they had planned, he is also looking forward to making the most of what is left of this Paralympic experience.
“In PyeongChang that was one of the things I enjoyed was going to support (skier) Scott Meenagh and I got to see some of the snow-boarding,” said Nibloe. 
“It was easier there because we were all in the same village, but it’s part of being this larger team, part of being ParalympicsGB. It’s not just curling, you’ve got other sports and other athletes, people that you’ll probably not see for the next four years, so if we get the opportunity, I’m sure we’ll get up there and lend our support.”
ParalympicsGB team:
Gregor Ewan
Hugh Nibloe (skip)
David Melrose
Meggan Dawson-Farrell
Gary Smith (alternate)
5 March
GB – Norway 5-7
GB – USA 10-6
7 March
GB – Switzerland 15-1
GB – Slovakia 3-7
8 March
GB – Estonia 10-5
GB – Sweden 4-6
9 March
GB – Canada 3-6
GB – Korea 6-8
10 March
GB – China
GB – Latvia
11 March
Semi finals
Bronze medal game
12 March
Gold medal game
Images: ParalympicsGB
