Curlers Bruce Mouat and Jennifer Dodds suffer bronze medal match heartbreak at Winter Olympic Games

Curlers Bruce Mouat and Jennifer Dodds have gripped the nation but the Olympic spotlight was a bad place to be when they bombed out of their bronze medal match with Sweden.

“It’s nice to be on the TV so much back home but to be 9-1 down in a game like that isn’t exactly a fun situation to be in,” said Mouat. “It’s pretty raw.”

A sloppy second half proved Britain’s undoing in their 6-5 semi-final loss to Norway, but this time it was a horrific start that saw them 7-1 down after three ends.

Shipping four in the second was the sucker punch and the world champions and one of the pre-Games gold medal favourites emerged from a topsy-turvy tournament with nothing.

“We’re obviously very gutted,” said Mouat. We’ve put in a lot of effort in the last two months to get to this point.

“We’re gutted to leave this tournament without a medal because we felt we were in the form to win one.”

Britain opened the scoring in the first end but Mouat misfired on a raise and Dodds failed to promote another stone with the hammer, squandered opportunities that set the tone.

The Swedes blew the game apart in the second end, when Oskar Eriksson played a wonderful takeout and De Val dislodged two stones to score a fantastic four.

Things didn’t improve in the third, Dodds missing a double takeout on the final stone as Sweden stole three and took an improbable seven-point lead.

In the opening game of the round robin, Almida De Val missed a regulation takeout with the last stone of the match that allowed Britain to escape with a 9-5 victory.

But she was in irresistible form when medals were on the line and Eriksson, a member of Niklas Edin’s men’s rink who will rival Mouat’s for gold, was at his consistent best.

The halfway mark didn’t herald a shift in