It's finally done. For a few months.
The final stones of the 2025/2026 competitive season were played in Geneva, Switzerland. And what a packed season it was! From various qualifying tournaments to European, junior, wheelchair, and other tournaments, Olympic competitions, and world championships in all disciplines. The final major event was the 2026 World Mixed Doubles Curling Championship. In recent years, we have typically fought at these championships to remain in the elite group, which ultimately consists of sixteen teams that emerge from two groups of ten. The tournament format is not overly complicated. The groups play a round-robin format. The top three countries from each group qualify for the playoffs based on their results, while the eighth and ninth-place teams face off in a crossover to remain among the world’s elite. This year turned out better for the Czech team than in previous years. An overall sixth-place finish in the group puts the Czech married couple Petra and Lukáš Klíma in eleventh place overall. The Klímas’ exact ranking was decided by the draw shot challenge (DSC), which moved the Czechs ahead of twelfth-place China. In this discipline (DSC), the Czech pair even made it into the top four! Eleventh place is a very solid result that definitely exceeded expectations, and the Czech pair deserves recognition for a series of strong performances and the overall positive impression they left. Out of a total of eighteen world championships (there was no competition in 2020), this is the tenth-best result (not third, as Radek Klíma mistakenly stated in his commentary on the World Championships), but above all, it marks a halt to the negative trend of the past few years.
The gold medals went to the Australians (Gill, Hewitt), for whom this triumph serves as a consolation for the disappointment of narrowly missing the Olympic Games. In a high-quality final, they defeated the Swedes (Westman, Ahlberg). The bronze goes to the Canadians (Lott, Lott), against whom the Czechs played a very close match in the group stage, decided only by the very last stone. The season is over; now it’s time for a short break, and in a few weeks, back to the grind!