The road to an Olympic Games is rarely a smooth one.
That's true even for curlers, who above all require the smoothest of paths to carefully glide their stones with the majestic precision of the master craftspeople who make them from Ailsa Craig's green and blue granite.
This week, eight men's teams and eight women's teams will battle it out for the final two places in Milan at the Olympic Qualification event at the Kelowna Curling Club in British Colombia, Canada.
Australia's women's team will be there, after battling through the pre-Olympic Qualification event back in October.
Skipper Helen Williams led her squad to a 3-3 record in the group stage in Aberdeen, Scotland, but then earned a 7-4 victory over Hungary to progress as the last qualifier.
That was despite losing 7-10 to that same team in the round robin phase of the competition.
"It's a very exciting win for us as a team but also for Australia as a curling nation with no curling ice," Williams said.
"The girls have worked so hard … it's been quite a journey for us."
The week after at the same venue, Australia's world championship bronze medal winners Tahli Gill and Dean Hewitt will battle with 15 other pairs for their spot at the Games.
Gill and Hewitt's success in recent years, becoming the first Aussies to qualify for the Olympic Games in Beijing in 2022 and then winning the nation's first world championships medal earlier this year, has helped Australia stamp its place in the sport despite the natural limitations placed upon them by geographical circumstance.
But the presence of the two Australian teams in Kelowna is not the most surprising or unexpected story among the competing nations.
That honour goes to the Philippines's men's team.
Cool Runnings meets Eddie the Eagle
The only thing less likely than an Australian curling team at the pointy end of qualifying for an Olympics is, arguably, to find one from the Philippines.
In 1972, cousins Juan Cipriano and Ben Nanasca both competed in alpine skiing at the Nagano Games, becoming the first athletes to compete at a Winter Olympics from a tropical climate nation.
In total, the Philippines have had just six Winter Olympians.
But there is a real chance that, come the end of this tournament in British Colombia, the men's curling team could join them.
Theirs is a story that mixes elements of Cool Runnings and Eddie the Eagle, with enough of a sprinkling of feel-good magic that would make their appearance one of the great Olympic fairytales.
It all started with Swiss businessman, Alan Frei.
In 2022, Frei was told he needed to do something about his weight, which was pushing up over 100kg.
"I was a 40-year-old overweight guy who had very bad physical health," Frei told Olympics.com.
"And I changed my life around with sport."
So, as you do, he decided to "shoot for the moon" and aim for the Olympics, or as Frei put it go "from obese to the Olympics".
"I went through all the original regulations and … pretty quickly, we were like, 'OK, there is zero chance of making it for Switzerland either in the Summer or the Winter Olympics. But my mom is Filipino,'" he told Olympics.com.
"And then we were like, 'OK, there might be a small chance at the Winter Olympics.'
"We came up with the event with the highest probability and that was to go cross-country skiing. So I went to the mountains. I got a trainer and I started with cross-country."
Cross-country skiing was not a good fit, but before long he was contacted by Christian Haller, a two-time world junior curling champion who also had Filipino heritage.
He was interested in seeing if Frei wanted to join Haller and brothers Marc and Enrico Pfister in their curling team.
That too wasn't, initially, a great fit.
Marc Pfister's first thoughts on seeing Frei slip and slide across the ice during their first training session in 2023 were pretty clear: "He has to be better really quickly," he recalled to Olympics.com.
Fortunately, he did get better.
Cancer survivor makes for genuine sporting fairytale
If Frei's story is the Eddie the Eagle section of this tale, then the magic comes from the elder of the two Pfister brothers.
Marc Pfister started curling as a six-year-old in his home country of Switzerland and progressed rapidly through the ranks alongside his brother Enrico.
However, not long after narrowly failing to qualify for the PyeongChang Games in 2018 with Switzerland, Marc had to pause all his curling activity for the foreseeable future following a cancer diagnosis.
"I had to stop for, I think, six months with curling, because it wasn't possible with the operation and the chemo," Pfister told Olympics.com.
"There was a point I thought about stopping with curling because the dream is over, the Olympics are gone, and there are a lot of other things that make you happy in life behind the curling,
"It was a really hard time with the cancer."
And yet, he soon returned to action and now, in the colours of the Philippines, his Olympic dream is still alive.
By October 2023, just four months after the team's first training session and having established Curling Pilipinas, they finished second in their very first tournament — despite having the still unsteady Frei slip over and fall heavily.
The team also finished second in the B-Division in their debut Pan Continental championships in Kelowna — a tournament they were only able to enter after Kazakhstan withdrew — but won it the following year and with it, promotion to the A-Division and a spot at the pre-Olympic Qualifier.
Having won that too, they now have their sights set on Kelowna once more, one last stepping stone to the Olympics.
And there is every chance they could make it.
Earlier this year, the team were the surprise winners of the Asian Winter Games in Harbin, China, surely silencing some of the doubters.
"I completely understand that people are critical about me and I feel kind of guilty, to be honest, because other people put in a lot of years into that and I get the recognition after one and a half years," Frei said.
"[But] this is the beauty of sports.
"It's not me buying a ticket to go to the Olympics, it's all about the hard work I put in. It's all about the team we are building."
A team destined to break new ground in Milan? Only time will tell.
