VICTORIA — It was a party for Cloverdale's Tardi family in Victoria on Sunday evening (Jan. 29).
Skip Tyler Tardi, 18, and his Team B.C. won the 2017 Canadian Junior Curling Championship title with a 9-7 victory over Team Ontario.
Team Tardi will now fly to South Korea for the 2017 VoIP Defender World Junior Championships, to be held from Feb. 16 to 26 in the city of Gangneung.
Tyler is joined on the team by his brother Jordan (second), lead Nick Meister, vice-skip Sterling Middleton and coach/dad Paul Tardi. They represent the Langley and Royal City curling clubs.
“I’m getting chills right now,” Tyler told Curling Canada. "There’s literally no words you can possibly say. It’s a dream I’ve always had, and it’s always seemed so distant. Now that it’s here, it’s just an unreal feeling. It’s pretty spectacular.”
Tyler, a student at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, made the shot of the day in the eighth end, curling a precision double takeout to score four and take a 8-5 lead.
"I thought it was there for three, for sure,” said Tardi. "I wasn’t sure if it would tick our own rock out. I was pretty happy with the result. We definitely needed a momentum swing since they’re really good when they get the momentum. So we really needed to take it back from them.”
It was B.C.’s fifth men’s gold medal at the Canadian Juniors, and first since Brad Kuhn prevailed in 2000 at Moncton, N.B.
Coach Paul Tardi was very happy to win a national championship with his two sons.
“With both of my sons, it can’t be any more exciting than that,” he said. “Tyler’s had a lot of opportunities (with Junior Olympics), but to have my older son part of it to go to Junior Worlds, it’s just amazing.”
Earlier Sunday, Alberta’s Kristen Streifel (Edmonton) won the women’s gold medal with a 5-3 win over Ontario’s Hailey Armstrong (Ottawa).
tom.zillich@thenownewspaper.com