CORTINA D'AMPEZZO (AP) — By the end of the Milan Cortina Olympic Games, there will have been a total of 147 curling matches crammed into 18 days. That's why Brad Jacobs is looking forward to some rest.
But first — he has a few things left on his to-do list.
There's an Olympic semifinal match. Then, if he's lucky, one for the gold. If not, then one for the bronze.
In either case, the Canadian curler is looking at roughly four to six more hours on the ice before he can relax. Curling matches usually run over two hours, and his team has already played nine matches over the last 8 days of the men's round robin. On top of that, the Canadians have had to maintain a competitive mentality while embroiled in a curling controversy so major it prompted World Curling to change — and then change back — the rules midway through the competition.
“It’s quite draining,” said Jacobs, visibly exhausted Thursday after a loss to Norway. “I think the Olympics is the hardest curling event on the planet ... It can certainly mess with the six inches between your ears if you allow it to.”
Athletes coming off the ice — even those far less involved in the controversy than the Canadians — say this Olympics has worn them down, physically and mentally. That reflects a near-constant competition schedule that has led to curling's popular reputation as the Olympic sport that's always on TV.
Curling is the only sport played every single day of the Games.
In Cortina, it began on Feb. 4, a full two days before the opening ceremony.
Each team will have played every other team before the semifinals, which sets it apart from others at the Winter Olympics. Hockey also has a round robin, but it's much shorter and limited to small groups rather than the entire field.
Curling's strenuousness is often overlooked. Curlers need an intense training regimen, dedicated to sustaining them through short bursts of cardiovascular exercise (sweeping) and keeping their legs flexible and strong to support the deep lunge position adopted when hurling the stone.
They must also keep their minds sharp to be precise in targeting and strategic in a game sometimes referred to as “chess on ice.”
Then, add in the natural fluctuations of the ice conditions, which have a direct effect on the way stones curl and their speed. Each match, curlers must “read the ice” anew.
Finally, remember that the competition schedule is non-stop.
Taken together, all this means that curlers spend hours between matches meeting with teammates to discuss strategy, working out team conflicts, seeing physiotherapists, refueling and psyching themselves up for the next match.
For Yannick Schwaller, the fun is just beginning.
Right after the Games, his team heads for the Swiss championships, where he says they will play 12 more matches beginning Monday.
“That’s going to be tough, but we’re not trying to think about that right now,” said Schwaller, whose team left the round robin undefeated.
“Of course it’s a grind. If we could choose, there would be a different schedule next week."
Out of the men's curling field at the Olympics, Schwaller has spent more time than most on the ice. He's part of a small group of curlers — including Brett Gallant on the Canadian men's team, Italians Amos Mosaner and Stefania Constantini, Cory Thiesse on the U.S. women's team and Brits Bruce Mouat and Jennifer Dodds — who entered this competition having already participated in mixed doubles directly before.
Mixed doubles was “really tough,” said Schwaller. His curling partner was his wife, Briar Schwaller-Hürlimann, with whom he had a different division of labor — he swept five rocks every end. Now, with the men’s team, he said he sticks to pitching — not sweeping.
Team Canada switched out Ben Hebert for alternate Tyler Tardi in their last round robin game Thursday, hoping to give the star player a rest ahead of semifinals and finals.
It's Tardi's first Olympics. He already knows he'd support a scaled-down competition schedule. He pointed out how in hockey, Olympic teams play three or four games ahead of playoffs.
“I kind of envy that, to be honest,” he said.
He's very much looking forward to his honeymoon in the Bahamas as a chance to relax.
Schwaller is training his sights on the May vacation he's planned with his wife, when he'll spend six days focused on wellness at a resort in Germany.
Amos Mosaner, the Italian who won bronze in mixed doubles, looked dejected after his team missed a spot in the semifinals. He said he'll allow himself “one or two weeks off.”
“It’s not only physically but also mentally you have to recover,” he said. “After that, I (will) come back on the ice — and to the gym — and I will start again.”
AP Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/milan-cortina-2026-winter-olympics
Canada's Brett Gallant, Marc Kennedy and Tyler Tardi in action during the men's curling round robin session against Norway at the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy, Thursday, Feb. 19, 2026. (AP Photo/Fatima Shbair)
Switzerland's Yannick Schwaller gestures during the men's curling round robin session against Germany at the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy, Tuesday, Feb. 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Fatima Shbair)
Canada's Brad Jacobs in action during the men's curling round robin session against Norway at the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy, Thursday, Feb. 19, 2026. (AP Photo/Fatima Shbair)
GENEVA (AP) — A "campaign of destruction" in October by Sudanese paramilitary forces against non-Arab communities in and near a city in the western region of Darfur shows “hallmarks of genocide,” U.N.-backed human rights experts said Thursday, a dramatic finding in the country's devastating war.
The paramilitary Rapid Support Forces — known as RSF and at war with the Sudanese military — carried out mass killings and other atrocities in the city of el-Fasher after an 18-month siege during which they imposed conditions “calculated to bring about the physical destruction" of non-Arab communities, in particular the Zaghawa and the Fur communities, the independent fact-finding mission on Sudan reported.
U.N. officials say several thousand civilians were killed in the RSF takeover of el-Fasher, the Sudanese army’s only remaining stronghold in the Darfur. Only 40% of the city’s 260,000 residents managed to flee the onslaught alive, thousands of whom were wounded, the officials said. The fate of the rest remains unknown.
Sudan plunged into conflict in mid-April 2023, when long-simmering tensions between its military and paramilitary leaders broke out in the capital of Khartoum and spread to other regions, including Darfur. So far, the war has killed more than 40,000 people, according to U.N. figures, but aid groups say that's an undercount and the true number could be many times higher.
The RSF overran el-Fasher last October and rampaged through the city in an offensive marked by widespread atrocities that included mass killings, sexual violence, torture and abductions for ransom, according to the U.N. Human Rights Office.
They killed more than 6,000 people between Oct. 25 and Oct. 27, the office said. Ahead of the attack, the paramilitary forces ran riot in the Abu Shouk displacement camp, just outside el-Fasher, and killed at least 300 people in two days, it said.
The RSF did not respond to an e-mailed request for comment. The group's commander, Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, has previously acknowledged abuses by his fighters, but disputed the scale of atrocities.
The report cited a systematic pattern of ethnically targeted killings, sexual violence and destruction and public statements explicitly calling for the elimination of non-Arab communities.
An international convention known colloquially as the “Genocide Convention” — adopted in 1948, three years after the end of World War II and the Holocaust — sets out five criteria to assess whether genocide has taken place. They include killing or seriously harming members of a group, preventing births or forcibly transferring children from the group, and inflicting measures to bring about the “physical destruction” of the group.
The fact-finding team said it found at least three of those five were met in the actions of the RSF: Killing members of a protected ethnic group; causing serious bodily and mental harm; and deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s physical destruction in whole or in part.
Under the convention, a genocide determination could be made even if only one of the five were met. The United Nations says a determination of genocide must be made by an international tribunal.
The head of the fact-finding team, Mohamed Chande Othman, a former chief justice of Tanzania, said the RSF operation were not “random excesses of war” but a planned and organized operation that bore the characteristics of genocide.
El-Fasher's residents were "physically exhausted, malnourished, and in part unable to flee, leaving them defenseless against the extreme violence that followed,” the team's report said. “Thousands of persons, particularly the Zaghawa, were killed, raped or disappeared during three days of absolute horror.”
The report documented cases of survivors quoting RSF fighters as saying things like: “Is there anyone Zaghawa among you? If we find Zaghawa, we will kill them all” and “We want to eliminate anything black from Darfur.”
It also pointed to “selective targeting” of Zaghawa and Fur women and girls, “while women perceived as Arab were often spared."
Mona Rishmawi, a member of the fact-finding team, told a news conference in Geneva on Thursday that the team's conclusion was based on evidence of mass killings, patterns of ethnic targeting and statements by perpetrators expressing intent to eliminate and destroy the targeted communities.
“When you basically prevent the population from food ... drinking water and medical attention and prevent them from humanitarian assistance," she said. "What do you want? You want to destroy them. You want to kill them.”
“We reached the point of genocide now,” Rishmawi told reporters, adding that her team expects the parties in Sudan’s war to get the message that “enough is enough.”
At a meeting of the U.N. Security Council on Sudan later Thursday, U.N. political chief Rosemary DiCarlo said that the “horrific events" in el-Fasher "were preventable.”
While el-Fasher was under siege, she said U.N. human rights chief Volker Türk repeatedly warned of the risk of mass atrocities, “but the warnings were not heeded.”
Türk has now also alerted the global community to the possibility of similar crimes in Sudan's Kordofan region, where the military and the RSF are fighting, DiCarlo said, urging action now to prevent a repeat of atrocities.
British Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper called the report's findings “truly horrific” and took them to the Security Council, saying she wanted to “ensure that the voices of women of Sudan who have endured so much are heard by the world.”
“Today’s report describes the most unimaginable and chilling horrors,” she said, citing the case of a woman asked by an RSF soldier how far she was in her pregnancy. “When she responded seven months, he fired seven bullets into her abdomen killing her,“ Cooper told the council.
“This is the worst humanitarian crisis of the 21st Century, a war that has left 33 million people in need of humanitarian assistance, 14 million people forced to flee their homes, famine stalking millions of malnourished children,” Cooper said.
“The world is still failing the people of Sudan,” she added."
The fact-finding team was created in 2023 by the Geneva-based Human Rights Council, the U.N.'s leading human rights body, which has 47 member nations.
The team called for accountability for perpetrators and warned that protection of civilians is needed “more than ever” because the conflict is expanding to other regions in Sudan.
Over the course of the conflict, the warring parties were accused of violating international law. But most of the atrocities were blamed on the RSF: The Biden administration, in one of its last decisions, said the paramilitary force committed genocide in Darfur.
U.N. experts and rights groups say the RSF has had the backing of the United Arab Emirates over the course of the war, allegations that the UAE denies.
The RSF grew out of the Janjaweed militias, notorious for atrocities they committed in the early 2000s in a ruthless campaign in Darfur that killed some 300,000 people and drove 2.7 million from their homes. Sudan's former autocratic ruler Omar al-Bashir is still sought by the International Criminal Court for genocide and other crimes committed at that time.
Magdy reported from Cairo. Associated Press writers Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations and Fatma Khaled in Cairo contributed to this report.
FILE - A Sudanese child, who fled el-Fasher city with family after Sudan's paramilitary forces attacked the western Darfur region, receives treatment at a camp in Tawila, Sudan, Nov. 2, 2025. (AP Photo/Mohammed Abaker, File)
FILE - Sudanese families displaced from El-Fasher reach out as aid workers distribute food supplies at the newly established El-Afadh camp in Al Dabbah, Sudan's Northern State, Nov. 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Marwan Ali, File)
FILE - Al Shafiea Abdallah Holy, an injured Sudanese man who fled el-Fasher city after Sudan's paramilitary forces attacked the western Darfur region, receives medical care at a camp in Tawila, Sudan, Oct. 30, 2025. (AP Photo/Mohammed Abaker, File)
FILE - Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, center, greets the crowd during a military-backed tribes' rally in the Nile River State of Sudan, July 13, 2019. (AP Photo/Mahmoud Hjaj, File)
