The Shot

​“I’ve always said, for a crowd watching that final, it was probably quite a boring game.”

Curling has never been a dramatic, stand-up-and-scream sport. There is no 250 km/h serve, or last minute shot from across the pitch to clinch the cup. There are no time trials, or photo finishes. Curling is deceptively unspectacular; a hold-your-breath sport. The stone drifts from one end of the rink to the other, spinning carefully like a planet, and the only sound is the yelling from the skip, which echoes around the chilled hall. The sport operates according to the tenseness of the atmosphere. Nobody goes into curling for the thrills.

Despite all of this, when Rhona Martin’s final yellow-handled stone settled in the centre of the red and blue concentric circles in Salt Lake City – right on ‘the button’ – she became the talk of the UK. Never mind that the United Kingdom is made up of four countries, only one of which actually cares about curling. Never mind that the last stone was actually played in the very early hours of the morning, Scottish local time. She had become a household name.

The household name is a status both unimagined and unwanted by most curlers. Curling is a Sunday pastime, an excuse for meeting up and socialising with friends. Bonspiels and major competitions are an ambition, but the results hold very little weight outside of the community. This was the world a young Rhona Howie from the village of Dunlop in Ayrshire thought she was entering.

Her parents didn’t curl, but her brother Drew once represented Scotland in the World Junior Championships, and Rhona thought she could give it a shot. The rink was cold, and she couldn’t get the knack of sliding down the ice on one foot without falling over, but she enjoyed it, so she kept going. Her ability grew with her stability, and soon came the National Championships, the European Championships, the World Championships. She had been curling for twenty years when her team’s silver medal at the Europeans and fourth place finish at the Worlds qualified them for the 2002 Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Although an extraordinary, difficult and rare achievement, qualifying to play for Great Britain at the Winter Olympic Games at that time didn’t generate much excitement outside the sporting community. The last time the country had won a gold medal was 1984, when Torvill and Dean danced their Boléro in Sarajevo. Since then, there had been a smattering of bronzes, but nothing that captured the public’s imagination like Steve Redgrave winning a fifth gold medal at his fifth Summer Olympics two years before. The last time a British team had won a medal in curling was 1924, and every curling team won a medal at the 1924 Olympics because they were the first ever Winter Olympics and only three teams took part.

Looking back at Salt Lake City fourteen years later, Rhona maintains that she and her team (made up of Janice Rankin, Deborah Knox, Fiona MacDonald, and the reserve Mags Morton) were undaunted by this history.

“When the time comes and you’re there, we had played all the teams before. We’d beaten them, we’d lost to them, so we knew that if we played well we were in with a good chance of making a medal game.”

When Rhona describes the various disasters, victories, and precious second chances of the tournament, she is careful not to romanticise it. There is the occasional “nerve-wracking” moment, and matches she can point to as pivotal, but it is apparent that, mentally, she approached the Olympics in the same way she would approach a Christmas bonspiel. This is the mind-set that led her team to Great Britain’s first Winter Olympics final in nearly two decades, and it is still visible in her description of that match.

“You’re just thinking, this is to win the game. That’s all you’re focused on doing, is winning that game. A lot of people say, ‘Oh, when you played the last stone, were you not nervous, because it was for a gold medal?’, but I honestly have to say, I never thought this is for a gold medal. It was like, I’ve got a shot to play, to win this game, you know, let’s do it.”

When that final stone settled right on the button, though, the calm exterior slipped, and Rhona lifted her brush above her head in victory. The crowd in the rink, and everyone watching in the early morning back home, were on their feet. Still, aware of curling’s status back home, she called home the next day and asked if their picture had made it to the back page of the Glasgow Herald newspaper.

“They said, ‘You’re on the front of every newspaper.’”

It was the right kind of story to appeal to the British public – a group of amateurs, who only began to practice full-time six months before the Games, triumphing over the teams that had dominated the sport for almost eighty years. Rhona was invited to the Royal Box at Wimbledon and the British Olympic ball, where she met, among others, Sir Steve Redgrave – “and they’re coming up saying, ‘Oh, it’s the curlers!’ and we’re chatting away, and it’s just surreal that curling was getting that attention”.

The entire team was awarded MBEs for services to curling, and the final yellow-handled stone now sits in the National Museum of Scotland. It is nicknamed the ‘Stone of Destiny’, after the rock upon which Scottish monarchs were once crowned.

Nobody goes into curling for the thrills, but for six months after that victory, “it was chaos.” As Rhona was trying to settle back into her life as a housewife and mother, there were calls to appear on quiz shows and chat shows, and newspapers asking for her opinion on matters that she didn’t care about. “It was difficult to juggle it all,” she says, “but you had to take advantage, because you knew it wasn’t going to last forever.”

Rhona, who has now switched back to her maiden name of Howie, retired from curling in 2006. She is now Scotland’s high performance manager in another deceptively unspectacular sport – lawn bowls. This was an unexpected career move from someone who had never bowled before, but she is on course to manage the Scottish team at the 2018 Commonwealth Games on Australia’s Gold Coast. This doesn’t mean she is leaving the curling world behind, though, as she still occasionally appears on TV during tournaments. 

It’s a very different world to the one in 2002. Thanks to an increase in funding, today’s Scottish curlers are professionals, who train hard all year with high precision equipment. Rhona coached Eve Muirhead, the figurehead for this new generation of curlers, and her team to an Olympic bronze at Sochi in 2014, the 2011 European gold in Moscow, and the 2013 World gold in Riga. Despite these changes, she still anticipates a return to the rink – although on a strictly casual basis.

“When you’ve been involved for so long, it’s very hard just to walk away, you know, cause it’s obviously a sport I love to play.

“I probably will go back. I definitely will at some point.”

The Last Three Months

Over the last three months, I’ve been asked more than a few times why I chose Ottawa. The reply that I’ve formulated mentions how I came to visit Ontario a few years ago with my family, and out of all the places we visited, Toronto, Kingston, Niagara Falls, it was Ottawa that left the biggest impression. I usually say that when I left the city, I thought that I wouldn’t mind living in Ottawa one day. I’ll mention how I loved the beautiful buildings, and the scenery, and the people, and how it maintains the convenience of a big city while still feeling comfortably small and friendly.

It’s strange, because it is a generic reply. It’s what everyone says, not just about Ottawa, but about Canada in general. We’ve reached the point where complimenting the country for anything has become a cliche. And somehow – this is going to sound bizarre to people from outside Canada – people here have got the idea that having a country that is nice to be in, means the same having a country that is a bit boring.

Canadians who are reading this: that is complete nonsense. Your country is not only one of the most admired and emulated in the world, it deserves to be so. It is vibrant, it is tolerant, it is gorgeous. It has its issues, naturally (one big thing I’ve learnt since coming here is that Justin Trudeau isn’t the infallible archangel the rest of the world makes him out to be), but honestly, they seem so wonderfully fixable, especially in the context of twenty-bloody-sixteen. With the Hieronymus Bosch pandemonium of Brexit going on back home, and the surreal, screaming nightmare that’s taking place in the USA, and the skin-scratching sense of impending horror in the rest of Europe, Canada is what we need to reassure us. And listen: it’s doing a great job.

Non-Canadians, do you fancy a laugh? Right now, Canada is reeling from an expenses scandal. It’s one of the biggest political stories of the moment. Remember when we had an expenses scandal? Which of us wouldn’t give a limb to return to those halcyon days where we were worried about 40p of taxpayers’ money being wasted, rather than £66 billion of it every year? Canada, never stop fighting for what’s right, but it won’t hurt to take a moment and appreciate just how good you guys have it. Justin Trudeau may have broken quite a few promises, but when he greeted those Syrian refugees at the airport, those images told people around the world that Canada will always be here to set an example.

I’ve had the huge privilege of experiencing this Canada close up since September, and almost everyone I’ve met here has confirmed it. That feeling I had the first time I visited Ottawa – the feeling that someone seems to have created a city just for me! – has lasted for months now. I’ve had the opportunity to see inside my favourite building in the world, the Library of Parliament. I’ve explored all but a couple of the city’s great museums. I’ve walked around the grounds of Rideau Hall when they were green, then when they were orange, then when they were white. I’ve learnt an incalculable amount, particularly from my journalism lecturers David and Brett, both of whom decided to just run with the idea of a foreign kid who had only two years of university experience joining a class meant for fourth year and Masters students. It’s been enjoyably bewildering.

A crazy number of people from all over have put in the effort to make me feel as welcome as possible. Cornelia, the owner of the house I stayed in before moving into my residence, who bought me a coffee and a cream cheese bagel the day I left. Lisa, the lady who was happy to be interviewed by a student a couple of days after he sent her a desperate message over Facebook. Jarred, one of the canteen workers at Carleton, who tries his hardest to strike up a meaningful conversation with every person he serves. The Quebecois lady who works in my favourite poutinerie in Gatineau, who very politely and patiently humoured my awful French. Arelis, my Venezuelan hairdresser who talked about the factors leading to the 2009 financial crash the first time I visited her, and the virtues of Swedish politics the second time.

I’m appreciative of the fact that I have met so many fantastic people over here that it would be pointless and dull to try and list them all. Instead, I’m going to try and say goodbye and thanks to them all in person.

I’ve got just under a week left in Ottawa now. Recently, I’ve been concerned that when the time comes to pack everything up and take the bus to the train station on the 18th, I might feel like I was only beginning to settle in, like the whole experience just passed me by as if it was a two-week holiday. That worry has dissipated. Ottawa, the city and its people, has left an impression on me for good. When I remember my time here in the future, it won’t be with regret, it will be with immense gratitude for everything it gave to me over the last three months. Hopefully, it won’t be too long until I return.