Curling Needs A Crossover Superstar

It is November 29, 2037, and the Canadian Curling Trials in North Bay, Ontario have just ended.

With the touch of a veteran twice his age, Canada’s most popular curler and one of the country’s biggest social media stars has earned his team a ticket to the 2038 Winter Olympics in Switzerland. The victory is the culmination of a dream for the 24-year-old phenom who won his first of four consecutive Briers at 19.

The fact he is also one of the world’s most popular content creators with 67 million global followers on TwoTaps—which replaced TikTok as the world’s most popular social media app in the mid-2030s—drew hundreds of journalists to the Olympic Trials. Millions of people livestreamed his team’s games online to see if he would do any of the creative dances that had made him famous in between ends … and he did not disappoint.

If you’re still reading this, you are likely wondering what The Curling News permits in a writer’s morning coffee.

Perhaps I’ve been seeing that betting company’s curling advert a bit too much? You know the one … where the sport has suddenly become a global craze, with throbbing stadiums, in-your-face merchandise and ticker-tape parades.

However unlikely, that opening scenario would help transform a sport currently struggling to maintain its foothold in Canada, where the game was a part of the fabric of many communities for decades ... but now has an ageing fanbase and a decreasing level of importance in the Canadian sporting landscape.

The curling establishment would scoff publicly at that last sentence, specifically the organizations and other entities that generate revenue from the sport. Behind the scenes, however, the establishment understands the sport is at a crossroads, but taking steps to attract a larger audience might cause the sport to alienate some of its existing audience—which is a tough decision.

The traditional curling audience skews older and would prefer their curling environment remain closer to what it was in the 1980s and 90s rather than evolve in ways that would facilitate attracting a new audience. Conversely, the current curling environment must draw a new, younger and more diversified audience.

The sport of curling needs a superstar, an athlete that transcends the sport.

Before fans start throwing names like Brad Gushue, Jenn Jones, Silvana Tirinzoni, Nik Edin and others at me, let me be more specific. The sport of curling needs a crossover superstar to bring people to the game who would otherwise never give it a second thought.

This is the only way curling will ever gain traction with a younger demographic—you know, the people curling needs to attract to replace the older generation of fans who are slowly joining that great curling club in the sky.

The sport of curling needs an attention-grabber, a player who has a pre-established audience and introduces it to the Roaring Game. With due respect to Jones and Edin, who are very much in the discussion regarding the greatest of all time, their 15,000 or so followers on Instagram don’t cut it.

Even the 300,000+ Instagram followers of Japan’s Chinami Yoshida, curling’s most popular athlete on social, don’t cut it.

Any athlete’s Facebook following is irrelevant to the sport’s long-term growth, given that the younger generation moved on from Facebook seven years ago.

Could an existing curler become a crossover star? Perhaps, but it would require a transformation in the sport that is unlikely to occur in the current environment. We live in a digital era where the eyes of consumers are increasingly glued to their tablets and phones, an era where you have seconds to capture someone’s attention before they move on to something else.

Meanwhile, the feeds of most curling teams consist of the same content as five years ago: clips of shots made, game results, schedule notes and sponsor appreciation posts.

Yawn.

When an athlete does step out of curling’s “social media comfort zone” to show a fun or quirky side—like Team Homan’s Emma Miskew has done over the past 18 months or so—they often get ridiculed by people in online forums, private Facebook groups or on Twitter/X. This says a lot more about the archaic mindset of many in the curling community than it does about Miskew’s social media posts (which happen to be pretty good).

The curling establishment is currently too constipated, too stuck in its ways, to attract a new, younger demographic.

There, I said it.

The sport of curling needs personalities—players willing to let those personalities shine on and off the ice.

To be clear, some current players have personalities that can and occasionally do shine on the ice. The pervasive environment in curling, however, encourages an approach where athletes are expected to be primarily stoic instead of demonstrative or fiery on the ice. The result is a blandness that does little to energize a crowd or develop the personalities the sport desperately needs.

Every curling event outside the Brier and Scotties and the men’s and women’s worlds look and feel the same for viewers. Very few events on tour attract a significant live audience, and the jury is still out on whether online viewership will ever reach the levels some would like us to believe they will.

Curling, of course, is not going anywhere. It will be played in Canada and elsewhere for generations to come. However, it is currently at a critical crossroads. The Roaring Game has lost much of its roar and needs a refresh.

The on-ice product has refreshed often over the past decade, with rule changes geared at creating more offence and making comebacks more likely than in the past. The sport now needs a cultural transformation that makes curling more inviting to younger people and allows player personalities to shine.

This process would be accelerated if the sport were blessed with a transcendent talent in the same vein as Tiger Woods, who opened the sport of golf to a whole new demographic and at overall levels that even Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus never could.

Twenty-five years after Tiger, a transcendent star in curling could come in different forms. A first-generation Canadian curling star may help introduce the sport to millions of first-generation Canadians from other communities. As mentioned earlier, curling’s transcendent star could be a social media king or queen who also happens to be a terrific younger player, willing to introduce millions of social followers to the sport.

Regardless of how it happens, the most straightforward path to developing a younger curling audience is to attach itself to a transcendent young star. Otherwise, curling will continue struggling to attract new demographics while appeasing a dwindling existing audience.