In April 2022, Korey Dropkin asked good friend Cory Thiesse to share a drink at Pickwick Restaurant & Pub overlooking the west edge of Lake Superior.
The setting in Duluth, Minnesota, was fitting. Pickwick is owned by retired national champion curlers.
Over beverages, Dropkin asked Thiesse: Will you be my mixed doubles curling partner?
“Not to be overly confident by any means, but I thought I had a pretty darn good chance that it was a slam dunk (yes answer),” Dropkin says now. “Our styles of play match each other very well.”
Thiesse was a little surprised by his offer. But it quickly made a lot of sense.
Thiesse and Dropkin came up through the sport together, albeit playing in separate women’s and men’s tournaments.
Each won their first junior national title in 2012. They got to know each other at the 2012 World Junior Championships in Östersund, Sweden.
When Thiesse’s women’s team played Canada, Dropkin’s men’s team of five attended with their bodies painted to spell out “U-S-E-H-?” to lighten the mood.
They each won their first senior national title in 2021. Each skipped a runner-up team at the trials for the 2022 Olympics.
“It just seems like we’re the perfect fit to be playing mixed doubles together,” Thiesse (née Christensen) said. “We’ve been friends forever. We get along super well. I guess I’d never really thought about it (playing together), honestly, and after he brought it up, I was kind of like, oh yeah, I think this would actually be really good. Like, let’s give it a try.”
A year after Pickwick, Thiesse and Dropkin became the first U.S. mixed doubles team to win a world championship. They were the first U.S. curlers in 20 years to win a world title in any event that’s on the Olympic program.
Olympic men’s and women’s curling tournaments have been held continuously since 1998. A mixed doubles event was added starting with the 2018 PyeongChang Games.
This week’s Olympic Mixed Doubles Trials are the first U.S. trials for any sport for the 2026 Milan Cortina Games. The pair that wins the tournament in Lafayette, Colorado, on Sunday can later this year clinch its Olympic spot through international competition.
Thiesse and Dropkin, born six months apart in 1994 and 1995, each trace their Olympic curling ambitions to the 2006 Torino Games.
Dropkin watched from his family’s Massachusetts basement as a group skipped by Pete Fenson became the first American team to win Olympic curling medals (bronze).
Thiesse held one of those unique 2006 medals when team member John Shuster came home to Duluth.
“This is somebody from our club, from Minnesota, that went to the Olympics and did this, that’s really cool,” Thiesse said. “Then it started to kind of be more of, I guess, an achievable type dream.”
Thiesse later partnered with Shuster in mixed doubles. They were runners-up at the first U.S. Olympic Trials in the event for the 2018 PyeongChang Games.
Shuster then skipped the U.S. men’s team in South Korea, winning the program’s first Olympic title.
Thiesse also made it to the 2018 Olympics as an alternate for the women’s team. Though alternates are sometimes called up to compete during the Games, an opportunity never arose for Thiesse over that week.
“It just gave me a little bit of a taste of what it could be like,” she said, “and definitely motivated me to want to go back and actually be playing and be on the ice.”
Dropkin was part of men’s teams that were runners-up at the Olympic Trials for 2018 and 2022. In fact, his team won the first game of each best-of-three championship series, but each time Shuster’s team rallied to take the last two.
“It’s gut-wrenching for the most part,” Dropkin said in 2018 of his first Olympic Trials runner-up. “The most common thing that people say to me is, ‘You’re still young. You’ll have plenty of years.’ As true as it is, it’s still frustrating because you’re given the opportunity just there and then. I don’t want to be the future. I want to be the present.”
In April 2022, five months after each lost in Olympic Trials finals, Dropkin asked Thiesse to be his mixed doubles partner.
Thiesse was technically still partnered with Shuster (a former Pickwick manager) at the time, but it was the offseason and the start of a new Olympic cycle.
“I called John shortly after that, and was kind of like, Korey asked me, I think I want to give it a try,” Thiesse said. "(Shuster) was like, ‘You have to. You should do it. All good.’”
Thiesse, also a lab technician in mercury analysis, and Dropkin, also a realtor, have since trained together at the Duluth Curling Club.
Dropkin has been there since moving from Massachusetts in 2013. For Thiesse, it has been a second home even longer.
“People have told me stories about me being in my car seat down at the curling club, watching my mom practice,” she said.
Now Thiesse and Dropkin practice under a red banner commemorating their title from the 2023 Worlds (where Dropkin’s mom also competed in the senior 50-and-older women’s division).
Dropkin will sometimes pass by Thiesse’s backyard — 2.75 miles away — on runs by Lake Superior.
“Our whole goal when we formed this team, three years ago now, was to go to the Olympics in 2026,” Thiesse said.
