Swiss juggernaut rolls on at World Women's Curling Championship; Canada misses the podium

The Swiss women's curling caravan rolls on, as the world stage gets a little more crowded and a frustrated curling nation wanders the desert.

Skip Binia Feltscher led her team to a 9-6 win over an upstart squad from Japan, to claim the 2016 World Women's Curling Championship in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, while Canada gets a fourth place finish and is left to ponder a gold medal drought that stretches back to 2008.

Meanwhile, when the sun rises in the East tomorrow, double check to see if it isn't, in fact, a giant curling stone.

Although Japanese skip Satsuki Fujisawa sent her final draw to the back of the house in the tenth end, securing the final two stolen points of the game for Switzerland, her young team's performance this week signalled that another Asian country has risen in the ranks, ready to tangle with the traditional curling powers of Canada and Europe. China won silver in 2008 and gold in 2009. They added bronze, in 2011. Now, Fujisawa - who is just 24-years-old and whose teammates are equally as young (lead Yurika Yoshida is, in fact, 22) - has stepped up to the plate. Based on this team's performance in Swift Current, it is hard to imagine not seeing them at the Olympics, in 2018.

The Japanese team had already accomplished its mission, even over-accomplished it before even stepping onto the ice against Feltscher's rink. Having never before won a medal at the worlds, it's safe to assume a playoff spot was a perfectly acceptable goal to achieve. Bronze would have seemed like gold.

The Swiss, meantime, just keep on keeping on.

Feltscher's team got hot at the right moment - they admit that their season has been rather unspectacular - and have ridden the crest all the way to a third straight world championship for their country, something that hasn't been done since Canada won four in a row back in the mid 1980's.

They were full value, as were the Japanese, in a game that featured a first half that as all defence and sharp shooting through five ends, Switzerland leading 2-1.

After the break, however, points were plenty, with each team scoring three-enders and Feltscher cementing a terrific deuce in the ninth end, with a pinpoint draw to the button. She and her team shot 85% in the final, with the skip booking an 89%. They were actually out-curled, on the whole, by Japan, who recorded an 88% as a team. Fujisawa came in at 84%, which was just shy of the mark she'd set to lead all skips during the round robin, despite battling a bad cold.

For Canada, the beat goes on and it's not the kind that makes you want to get up on the dance floor and lose your inhibitions. Russia's 9-8 victory over Chelsea Carey's team in the bronze medal game left the Canadians off the podium completely for the first time since 2009 and marked the eighth straight year that Canadian women have failed to win gold.

It's the nation's longest ever drought in this competition and it just got longer.

So what is wrong with Canadian curling to allow this stretch to lengthen? Well, there's nothing so wrong with Canadian curling as there is so right with the rest of the world. Expecting that gold is a given and that the failure to nab it means Canada blew it, somehow, is to do a disservice to the level of excellence in other countries. That Russian team that scored the bronze is a damn good one, for instance, beating Carey's squad three times this week, and Feltscher's Swiss team made their resumés pop when they knocked off Rachel Homan in the 2014 final.

Inconsistencies plagued this year's version of Team Canada and that is a familiar summary from past competitions. "It was the same kind of roller coaster that our week kinda was, which is frustrating," said Carey of the bronze medal game, which featured some nice shotmaking but also some missed opportunities.

Domination by Canada is not the norm and anyone assuming it ought to be has not been paying attention. The rise of Asian teams in the last decade along with the strengthening of Europe is real and it has been bolstered by Canadian coaching, so the nation can take pride in that.

According to statistics at CurlingZone.com, Carey's team has played 102 games this season, including Worlds. Sidorova's team has played 85, while Fujisawa's (80) and Feltscher's (78) have played fewer than that. Is fatigue part of the problem?

The grind of climbing to a Scotties win and then quickly turning around to fight through another tough competition might be a factor. If so, moving the national championship ahead a few weeks might help with rest and recovery - both physical and emotional - but that would mean a mess in the provinces and territories as they'd all need to scramble to adjust playdown schedules. Could always ask the World Curling Federation to move the global championship back a couple of weeks or so. Good luck with that.

Rather than what failings are dogging Canada, the real takeaway from this year's World Women's Curling Championship is that the game's excellence resides not only in places like Calgary and Ottawa and Winnipeg. It's there, too in places like Flims and Moscow. Oh, and Kitami, Japan.

We should already know that, though.