Curling's only scandal: How 'Broomgate' changed the game forever

Curling is a sport marked more by its politeness than its competitiveness, but in 2015, a seemingly simple change to a piece of equipment set off an uproar that still cuts deep for many in the sport.

It was called Broomgate, and as a competitive curler, I found myself in the middle of it.

I was one of the first players on the World Curling Tour to use a Hardline broom, and I thought I knew just about everything there was to know about the story: A new broom company emerges on the scene and club curlers really like their brooms. They praise their lightness and the speed at which they can move the broom head, as it's made out of a material that reduces friction between the broom head and the ice.

Competitive curlers like me start to use it. We really like it. It holds the rock straighter than ever before. It makes the rocks go further than we thought possible.

Elite curlers start to use it. Mike McEwen, who skipped one of the top teams in the world, has pretty much the best curling tour season we've ever seen.

Brad Gushue wonders what might happen if he tries a new sweeping technique with it: only using one sweeper instead of two. It turns out that with that technique, we can do anything. We can make the rocks curl. We can make them stay so straight it looks like they're backing up. Chaos ensues.

It's really curling's only scandal. There have been other blips on the radar, but this was the main thing. Broken friendships, intense rivalries, rumours of lawsuits between broom manufacturers and the sport's governing bodies, and it all led to, in the words of four-time world champion and 40-year curling veteran Glenn Howard, "the worst curling season of my entire career."

The strange part is, considering it is one of the most controversial things that ever happened in the sport, no one has ever really talked about it. An interview here, a soundbite there. But we've never gotten the full story.

So I set out to find that full story in Broomgate: A Curling Scandal.

It's a six-part series that covers everything from the invention of the broom, to the in-fighting, to the eventual solution that was hammered out over a few stressful days in the tiny town of Kemptville, Ont. It's available now wherever you get your podcasts.

Decorated curler Brad Gushue, of St. John's, N.L., holds the controversial Hardline broom. (Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press)

Going into making the series, I felt that my goal was to tell the story I had already heard, and one told to me countless times, from players, rulemakers, broom manufacturers, and anyone else who knew I was lending my ear to listen. I expected it to follow a certain path, but it turns out that there was still a lot I had to learn about Broomgate once I started truly digging into the story.

A question I got asked a lot in the lead-up to and aftermath of the podcast's release was "why now?"

Most of the controversy occurred over a single season, from the fall of 2015 to the spring of 2016. I thought nine years was just about the perfect amount of time because it felt like a lot of the wounds were healed and people would be ready to talk about it. Also, it was recent enough that curlers would not have forgotten what happened.

I was right about the second part. Perhaps too right. A lot of curlers have not forgotten what happened, and it has led them to still not want to talk about it. No one died. No one is in any sort of danger for sharing their story. And yet, quite a few curlers still told me no. Some told me no after telling me yes, that taking some time to think about it and what they might say gave them enough pause to cancel their interview with me.

I would watch these true crime series and see mothers of dead sons weeping not only for the loss of their child but also because they were afraid that whoever may have killed them would see the documentary and enact revenge. And I was having trouble getting curlers to talk about a damn broom.

I underestimated how deep the cuts still were. Curling is a nice game. A polite game. Many of the top competitive curlers are friends. Those friendships, some of which have been healed and some of which haven't, are what prevented curlers from wanting to talk. They didn't want to do any more damage to the overarching sense of politeness that rules our sport.

When that politeness was shattered back in 2015 — perhaps for good — it changed their view of the sport. Things couldn't be the same again, and they didn't want to go back there.

The other key thing I learned while making the podcast was that we would not have been able to emerge from this scandal and from those deep cuts without the rock-solid community foundation that curling is built on. I knew a lot about the scandal, but what I didn't realize was how much of an effort it took on all sides and from all the corners of the globe to come up with a solution.

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Other sports that have had similar issues with their technology took years to solve it. Heck, golf still can't decide how nerfed it wants its drivers and balls to be, even threatening to stunt the casual player's growth on the links in the name of parity at the top. Curling solved its problem in about eight months.

In the fall of 2015, Brad Gushue debuted the one-sweeper technique and forced the curling world to realize it wasn't just the Hardline brooms that were too good, but it was absolutely all of them, even hair brooms that had been in use for over 30 years. Technique was just as much to blame as the fabric.

Eight months later, the entire curling world descended onto the tiny town of Kemptville, Ont., to find a solution. And they worked together to do it. Men and women.

Curlers who played against each other every week were now teaming up to discuss which broom fabrics were too strong, which techniques were too great. Broom manufacturers paid their own way to be there, only to be barred from seeing exactly what was happening on the ice, rushing to staple varying fabrics onto varying broom head materials in search of a solution.

'The Sweeping Summit' brings detente

No other sport could do this. The camaraderie and the community spirit triumphed over all the hurt feelings in that season, and they emerged from what was dubbed "The Sweeping Summit" with a universal fabric for competitive play. It's still in use today.

I don't think I ever took a step back and fully grasped just how many people got involved and put aside their differences to make it happen. If they hadn't, the sport may have never recovered.

So where do we go from here?

There are reports some curlers are still not satisfied, whether it's with the broom material or the sweeping techniques. There's news of more studies being done to figure out just how much affect any of this has on the rocks. For as old of a sport as curling is — over 500 years old, in fact — it's still a marvel how much we have to learn about it.

We asked a lot of curlers over the course of this project if there could be another Broomgate, and while most of them admitted that it's possible there's things to learn about sweeping and we may have to figure those things out, they felt confident that what happened in the Broomgate year taught them valuable lessons that will prevent it from happening again.

The community in our sport is safe, and it is strong, and it's what makes curling an extremely special game.