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“I wouldn’t have done it, but we’re different that way,” Danish skip Madeleine Dupont said after the game.

“I’m not going to be mad about it. She can choose to do whatever she wants.”

Photo by Natacha Pisarenko / AP

Dupont added to the controversy by suggesting Homan admitted touching a rock in the game herself but didn’t remove it. The onus is on the non-offending team to make those calls.

“She’s allowed to (remove the rock) but later in the game she said ‘Oh, I just touched this one’ and she’s like ‘Oh, but that’s OK and didn’t do anything about it,’ ” Dupont said.

Joan McCusker, one of the curling analysts on CBC, did not like Homan’s decision to remove the rock.

“I think that was a rash move to take it off,” she said during the broadcast. “They should have left it in play. It doesn’t look good on you.”

The rules of curling say that a non-offending team has three choices when a rock is burned after the hog line (rocks that are burned before the hog line come off automatically): They can remove the rock that was touched and replace all other rocks that were displaced after the infraction; they can replace all stones where they reasonably consider the stones would have come to rest; or they can leave the stones where they come to rest.

The Canadians — Homan’s team includes third Emma Miskew, second Joanne Courtney and lead Lisa Weagle — chose the first option and it helped them score four points.

“When the sweepers burn the rock, as the non-offending team it’s a burnt rock so it’s to be removed,” Homan said. “There are options and we’ve burnt rocks in the past and they’ve come off … burning a rock is not something that you can do. So obviously, we’ve done it in the past and they just happened to do that then, so it’s just the rules I guess.”