Lyburn to don Maple Leaf

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This article was published 09/12/2016 (3465 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A Scot wearing a Maple Leaf on his back walks into a bar in China.

This could be the opening line in a joke, but it could be the life for former Brandonite William Lyburn for the next week. The 42-year-old, who was born in Scotland and moved to Canada in the early 1990s, has been selected to represent Canada at the Qinghai International bonspiel in Xining, China.

The event is like a world championship, with eight men’s and eight women’s teams representing their respective nations. Lyburn and his Winnipeg-based foursome of Richard Daneault, Jared Kolomaya and Braden Zawada were selected based on their standing in the Canadian Team Ranking System at the end of last year and whether other teams were interested in going.

All of those teams above them in the rankings except for Glenn Howard are playing in the Grand Slam event in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., right now, and Lyburn jumped at the chance to go and represent Canada in the event, which begins Sunday.

“It was pretty exciting when the Team Canada gear arrived last week with our names on it and stuff,” Lyburn said before flying out Thursday morning.

“At the end of the day, we worked hard the last couple of years to come up the CTRS listings. For us, this was a little perk that we never knew about which kind of came our way. It’s a pretty neat opportunity for us to kind of give us a feeling of we have to go there and perform.

“We get to travel and compete and wear Canadian colours, which will be pretty cool.”

The Lyburn team, which was ranked 19th in the world and narrowly missed out on being among the top 15 teams which qualify to play in the Grand Slams this season, will fly into Beijing and then have a connecting flight to Xining. They don’t expect to arrive at their hotel until early Saturday morning and will have their practice session nine hours after that.

Lyburn, who represented Scotland at the 1992 world junior curling championships and was the fifth on Rob Fowler’s 2012 team that earned a bronze medal at the Brier, is relieved he only has to play one game on Sunday and Monday to ease into the tournament. However, Lyburn expects a lot of tough games that will challenge his team to reach the semifinals on Dec. 16.

“I’m going to enjoy the chance to play in the closest thing to what I played in back in the world juniors when I had Scotland on my back,” he said. “With the teams that are there, there’s no cakewalk because you have (Thomas) Ulsrud from Norway that goes to a world championships every year, the Russian team that is good, Craig Brown from the U.S. and (Rasmus) Stjerne from Denmark. It’s quite a field.”

Lyburn, who hopes to make the Canadian Olympic Pre-trials and views the Qinghai International as good preparation for that, only has to play two games a day twice during the round robin. He hopes that will give him and his teammates a little bit of time to explore the area as tourists, allowing them to make the most of their time overseas and be competitive wearing a Canadian jersey.

“It will be a pretty busy week,” said Lyburn, who admitted it has taken a long time to represent Manitoba and Canada since he sported a Scotland shirt, but hopes to do it again in the next few years. “I’m sure it will take a couple of days to catch up on the travel. It will be more of trying to rest and stay hydrated and take in some of the different culture. It’s nice that we’re only playing one game a day for the first couple of days.

“We’ll go out there and play seven games of curling, minimum, and hopefully we have a chance to play on the Friday and Saturday.”

» cjaster@brandonsun.com

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