Latest news with #SophieJackson
Yahoo
23-03-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Scotland skip Jackson 'excited' at Olympic prospects
Scotland skip Sophie Jackson believes her rink can be "excited" about their Winter Olympic prospects despite being knocked out in the play-off round at the World Women's Curling Championship in South Korea. Sophie Jackson's rink, ranked 19th in the world, had beaten Rachel Homan's Canadians in their opening round-robin game before the world number ones gained revenge on their way to retaining their title by beating Switzerland in Sunday's final. Finishing sixth in the round robin was enough to ensure that a Great Britain rink will be represented at next year's Olympics in Milan-Cortina and Jackson is hoping her team have done enough to be selected to defend the title. "Looking at where we are now compared to where we were this time last year is so encouraging and just shows us where we can be in another year's time," Jackson said. "We are all excited by the prospect of where we can get to." Scotland second Sophie Sinclair was included in the LGT World Women's Championship All Star team, picked annually on the basis of the player in each position who has the best playing statistics over 12 round-robin matches. "Every single one of the team had multiple stellar performances this week and it's fantastic to have Sophie sitting at the top of the stats for seconds," Jackson said. "I'm super proud of the whole team for how we approached this week and the quality performances that we were able to put together." Sinclair was quick to share the credit with Jackson, who has skipped the team while playing lead stones, third Jen Dodds and Rebecca Morrison, who plays last stones. "It's a huge achievement because, as a team, we have worked so hard on the placement of the second stones and how we have improved our tactical game, so it has just been so nice to see those shots coming off," Sinclair said. "It's been a really good week and we're now looking forward to working hard next year. It shows what potential we have as a team, which is super exciting." Homan went on to gain revenge for Canada's round-robin defeat by beating South Korea in the semi-final before securing her fourth world gold with a 7-3 victory over Switzerland. Canada had been the only side to defeat Silvana Tirinzoni's rink as the Swiss topped the round-robin, but the second seeds were unable to turn the tables and secure their skip a fifth world title despite leading 3-2 after six ends. Meanwhile, Rui Wang's China beat Eunji Gim's hosts 9-4 to take bronze.
Yahoo
22-03-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Scotland knocked out of curling worlds by holders Canada
Scotland have been knocked out of the World Women's Curling Championship after losing 10-4 to reigning champions Canada at the play-off stage in South Korea. Sophie Jackson's rink, ranked 19th in the world, had beaten the world number ones in their opening round-robin game - one of only two matches Canada lost on their way to finishing third in the table. But two-time champion Rachel Homan's rink established early control in the play-off after scoring four at the second end. Another three at the fourth set them up for a victory with two ends to spare. The Scots had finished sixth in the round robin with seven victories and five defeats, their finish at least ensuring that a Great Britain rink will be represented at next year's Winter Olympics in Milan-Cortina. However, it is Canada who progress to Saturday's semi-final against hosts South Korea. Gim Eun-ji's 10th-ranked rink qualified directly for the last four after finishing second in the round robin with the same lost 10, won two record as Canada but having beaten the holders 11-7 earlier in the week. There was an upset in the other play-off as two-time silver medallist Anna Hasselborg's third-ranked Swedes, who finished fourth in the round robin, were beaten 8-7 by China. Wang Rui's rink, ranked 17th in the world, progress to face Silvana Tirinzoni's four-time champions from Switzerland, the second seeds who topped the round-robin and whose only defeat came against Canada.
BBC News
20-03-2025
- Sport
- BBC News
Scotland's women face top-six showdown at curling worlds
World Women's Curling ChampionshipVenue: Uijeongbu, South Korea Dates: 15-23 MarchCoverage: Watch selected Scotland matches live on the BBC Sport website, app & iPlayer Scotland face two potential top-six deciders against Denmark and China on Friday at the World Women's Curling Championship in South expected, Sophie Jackson's rink consigned Turkey to a ninth defeat in their 10 round-robin 10-6 win on Thursday means the Scots sit sixth in the table with six wins and four defeats, one place above Madeleine Dupont's Danes, who have won five of theirs with two games the top six progress to the next stage and a win over the Danes could take the pressure off the Scots when they face China, who sit fifth with six wins and three defeats, in their final round-robin Wang's China are currently ranked 17th in the world, two places above the Scots, while Dupont's Danes are world champion Silvana Tirinzoni's Swiss are the only team to have guaranteed qualification so far despite suffering their first round-robin defeat when the world number two side were edged out 7-6 by Rachel Homan's holders and world number ones Canadians, Anna Hasselborg's Sweden and Eunji Gim's hosts all have seven wins and two top eight nations in the Olympic standings at the end of the event are assured of their places at Milan/Cortina Britain currently sit eighth after Jackson and her team's showing at the 2024 World Championship.
The Guardian
18-03-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
Anti-plague amulets and IOUs: the excavation that brings Roman London thundering back to life
Archaeologists don't always get lucky when a site is redeveloped in the middle of London. People have been building in the city for millennia and, in more recent times, bombing it. But if the building before went too deep, or there has been too much exposure to the air by bomb damage in the past, there won't be much to find. Things were especially bad before 1991, when there was no planning protection for anything but scheduled ancient monuments. 'We used to have to beg to get on site,' says Sophie Jackson, archaeologist at the London Museum. It's not that developers are insensitive, says Jackson: 'When we did the excavation at Barts hospital, [it] was functioning above us – we were right under the MRI machines. Developers recognise the social value.' It's just that the stars don't often align. But when Bloomberg, the financial media company, acquired the Bank junction site in 2010, the stars were aligned. Before this excavation, I'm afraid, I conformed to the gender stereotype and rarely thought about the Roman empire. Since I saw the London Museum's new, unparalleled, internationally seismic collection, I have thought of little else. A total of 14,000 objects, 81,000 fragments of animal bones and 73,000 shards of pottery were recovered from this single site – the largest acquisition the museum has ever had from one place. They will be on display from 2026 at what used to be the site of Smithfield meat market. Geography mattered on the Bloomberg site in the heart of the City, close to the Bank of England. The Walbrook, a lost river of London, had carved a deep valley into the landscape and the Romans constantly tried to reclaim the banks as the city grew and prospered. They did this by packing the ground with rubbish, building on it, then packing it again, three more times, so there is a stratigraphical layer cake of Roman trash going almost all the way back to London's creation, in AD47 or 48. The river also waterlogged the ground, protecting the material from oxygen: leather, brooches, shoes, writing tablets, wood, animal bones and ceramics were all phenomenally well preserved. There are sandals that look fresher than last year's Birkenstocks. Site B2Y10 – to give it its academic name – was previously occupied by Legal and General, which dug deep in the 1950s, to create the biggest post-blitz rebuild in the City. Excavating archaeologists found the third-century Temple of Mithras, and oral histories from Londoners who witnessed the find in 1954 recall a magical atmosphere, when the secrets of the ancient past met the regeneration of the postwar present to create a sense of enormous hope and renewal. People queued for hours to see the temple. One woman who was pregnant at the time called her baby Mithra. As significant as that archaeological yield was, it was pretty haphazard – workers on the site were just picking things up and handing them in. The Legal and General building had huge double basements, except on one side, where they had had to stay shallow for fear of jeopardising a Christopher Wren church on the opposite corner. 'We were so excited by that single basement,' Jackson says. 'We knew that in the layer underneath, that they hadn't dug into, a lot of material would have survived.' Across 150 years of previous Roman recoveries in London, 19 writing tablets were found in total. In this one find, there were 500, of which 80 have already been deciphered. These are wooden frames, with an inset writing area about 'the size of a Ryvita', which would be filled with black wax, then written on. The wax has long degraded, but you might get lucky with a heavy-handed scribe and be able to read the indented text on the wood beneath. Or it might be a palimpsest, an original script overwritten at a later date, and you'll see fragments of numerous messages, obscuring each other. The first tablet they read, dated 8 January AD57, was a financial document – an IOU. 'They were amazing bureaucrats, the Romans,' Jackson says. 'And it's nice for Bloomberg, isn't it?' The team managed to recover the names of 100 Roman Londoners we had never heard of. 'One tablet says, 'Take this to someone's house, it's by the house of Catalus.' It really struck me. These people had their city, as much as we have it as our city,' Jackson says. 'There's a really gossipy one,' says curator Meriel Jeater, 'a bloke who's writing to someone called Titus: 'Everybody's talking about you in the market, saying you've lent them money. You've done a really bad deal; you shouldn't appear shabby.'' Alan Pipe, the museum's animal bones specialist, shows me some skeletal remains on which 'every tool mark, every nick made by a butcher's knife' is visible. He could almost recreate a day in the life – or certainly the meals – of a Roman Londoner. Many of the bones are from cows, pigs and sheep; there are others from chickens but fewer. Chickens only appeared in the UK during the iron age, and were not regularly consumed until the third century. Hares and other game, as well as fish, give us an overall picture of the diet. You can gauge the skeletal age of the beasts from scores of amazingly preserved mandibles (lower jaws) and how worn the biting surfaces of the teeth are, Pipe explains. If a pig died at a year old, you can infer an amount of animal husbandry and agriculture. He shows me chunks of bone resultant from 'splitting and smashing, way beyond what's necessary for butchery'. This was probably for boiling and grease extraction. You can also cross-reference these bones with other items found in the same layer, and archaeologically date the whole lot with associated finds – with ceramics in particular, as the techniques and ingredients evolved quite quickly and distinctively. You can pinpoint an era more precisely from a shard, sometimes, than from a coin, which may still have been in use 40 years after it was minted. Dendrochronology (dating by analysing tree trunk rings) is better still because trees would have been built into a building, so you can pinpoint it to the year. Sure, if some helpful Roman wrote the actual date on to a tablet, that works as well. The museum's senior finds specialist, Michael Marshall, has 750 pairs of Roman shoes believed to date from the second half of the first century AD. The Claudian invasion (that is, the main Roman invasion in AD43, led by Claudius) brought new Mediterranean styles and materials, such as a dainty flip-flop – the adults' hobnailed, the children's not. You can see evidence of a big military presence – the paraphernalia of war, the ceramic leftovers of those catering to thirsty soldiers. There is plenty of evidence of people living very comfortable, good lives in the centre of London in AD50: the shoes are finely made, and there are gradations of material and craft in the pottery, which suggests some people were already considerably wealthier than others. There are a number of face pots (domestic pots with facial features carved into or applied on to them), for example, some of which are very crude, others exquisitely detailed. One depicts a woman with complicated hair and is thought to represent a maenad, a female follower of Bacchus, god of wine, who were associated with divine frenzy. There are a lot of snakes on the ceramics, representing agriculture, hope, rebirth and fertility, and also suggesting cultural cross-pollination with the European continent and people moving between one place and another – almost as if they had invented freedom of movement by the first century AD. There was also slavery – there are shackles in the find, too. Then there are anomalies that tell us something about the limits of Roman understanding. Jackson shows me a black, pebble-like object with three indentations on it, in which someone has tried to make a hole, to turn it into a pendant. Finding the material unnaturally unyielding, the Romans decided these were 'solidified thunderbolts', she says. 'It's so interesting to think of Romans doing archaeology themselves.' Not very well, mind; it wasn't a solidified thunderbolt, it was a neolithic hand-axe made of obsidian. It's a reminder that we modern humans are also capable of misreading the signs. In the 1954 excavation, for example, they found beads that were assumed to have been worn by a woman, but here, those same beads and amulets were found still on their original strings, alongside other material that indicates they were worn by a horse. 'It might have been a lady horse,' Marshall allows. Horses wore amulets covered in sexual imagery – such as fist-and-phallus amulets, with a clenched fist gesture at one end and an unmetaphorical phallus at the other, which was thought to ward off the evil eye. Children also wore amulets to ward off plague. As Jackson says, these people had their London as much as we have ours. A trove this size, when it goes on display next year, offers not so much a glimpse of the past as an immersion into it. It's like falling head-first into the first century – in so much detail you can almost smell it.
Yahoo
18-03-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Scots sustain fourth defeat at World Women's Curling Championship
World Women's Curling Championship Venue: Uijeongbu, South Korea Dates: 15-23 March Coverage: Watch selected Scotland matches live on the BBC Sport website, app & iPlayer Scotland's struggles at the World Women's Curling Championship in South Korea continued with a fourth loss of the round-robin stage. Sweden defeated Sophie Jackson's rink 5-3 early on Tuesday and Lithuania are up next for the Scots at 10:00 GMT. Sitting 10th of 13 in the standings, Scotland have two wins so far and have also still to face the United States, Japan, Turkey, Denmark and China. A top-six place is required to progress to the play-offs. Scotland sit third bottom after day three at World Curling
