The truth is that after 200 or so years of curling no one understands why the stone curls. Really. The laws of physics suggest the stone’s path should bend in the opposite direction to its rotation, so if you spin a stone to the right, it would travel to the left, and vice versa. In fact it does the exact opposite. Researchers have come up with three competing theories why, but no one knows which is right. “Yeah, it hurts my head to even think about how it does it, so I generally don’t,” says Bruce Mouat. “I just accept that it does.” It is one of the few things about the sport Mouat hasn’t turned his mind to.
You’re going to see a lot of Mouat in the next couple of weeks. He is competing in the men’s event and the mixed doubles in Beijing, the latter of which starts on Wednesday, and his teams are among the favourites for both. It means he’s going to be competing for 16 days in a row, “which is obviously going to be quite intense”, and, if they play out as he hopes, that his life may be about to change in ways he doesn’t yet understand. These are Mouat’s first Games but he remembers the public’s fleeting obsession with Eve Muirhead’s team, who won bronze in 2014, and David Murdoch’s, who won silver the same year. He was too young to recall Rhona Martin’s gold in 2002, “but since then I’ve watched it a hundred times since.”
Mouat is talented, affable and articulate. It’s easy to imagine how the public might fall for the 27-year-old and his team, if they go on a run to the final. Martin is a hero of his, he says, “not just because of what she has done in her curling career, but because is such a great, down-to-earth person on top of that, she never let the success she had consume her. She’s very inspiring.” He is too. Mouat is gay, and talks eloquently about how his decision to come out to his teammates has shaped his life and his sporting career.
“It was in 2014,” he says, “I was really starting to travel, going to Switzerland, Norway, all these amazing places, but there was always this lingering thing in the background that I wasn’t able to be honest with my team. We were all teenage boys so obviously we were talking about girls and those kinds of things teenage boys do, and I was very aware of how self-conscious I was being, and how much I was trying to hide away and not show that I was different to them.” He came out to his parents that April, and told them he really wanted to let his teammates know too. “They weren’t sure, because they were very protective of me.”
Mouat ended up talking to a sports psychologist about it. “That really simplified my thoughts,” he says. “I realised that it really didn’t matter what my sexuality was, what mattered to me was being a good curler and a good teammate, and being able to be honest with them was very important to me. So that was the reasoning.” The team were some of the first people he came out to.
“I felt like if I’m going to be honest with anyone, it might as well be them. And honestly from that moment on there was almost like an instantaneous switch. It relieved me of that pressure to agree, or feel a certain way, I was able to be open and honest with all of them. It was definitely a very freeing moment. Looking back now I’m just so happy it did happen, and I almost wish I had done it sooner, because who knows what I might have achieved way back when I was 18 years old.”
Mouat shouldn’t worry, he has achieved plenty as it is. In 2017 he became the youngest men’s skip ever to win a grand slam event, but he really kicked on last year. Mouat and his rink, Hammy McMillan, Bobby Lammie and Grant Hardie, have been on a run that won them silver at the world championships, as well as a hat-trick of grand slam titles. In between all that, he and Jen Dodds won the world championship in the mixed doubles.
His form has drawn a lot of attention in the small world of his sport, where there’s been a lot of talk about what he’s doing, and in particular his use of data analytics. In a Guardian article last year, Mouat’s approach was linked to Moneyball, something the man himself is a little baffled by. “I’m not really sure why we’ve been deemed as the team that does it most, because I’m pretty sure a lot of the other countries are doing it as well,” he says.
Data analysis started to come into the sport in 2010 but really took off in 2018 when the Swedish women’s team, who beat Muirhead’s GB rink in the semi-finals, spoke about how much they used it. Mouat’s generation have taken it on further. “The funding that we’ve got through the Lottery and UK Sport and on top of that we’ve now got video analysis people working, and they have almost changed our view on the game,” he says.
Curling is a strategic game. “That’s why I got hooked on it,” Mouat says. “We’re literally trying to think of everything two steps ahead of the opponent.” It’s not enough just to know the tactics any more. Analysis helps them “understand what’s the percentage chances of winning the game if you make a certain shot in a certain situation at the end of the game, or to spot trends in the way the opposition play, so we can focus on forcing them into those situations that they don’t want to be in.”
For all the talk about it, Mouat says strategy is “only 20% of the game” and the data analysis is really just about the last little “one or two per cent” of that part of it. Mouat actually puts more of his success on the lockdowns, which allowed his team to put together a long run of structured training without worrying about travelling back and forth around the world for competitions.
Of course the restrictions had a bad side, too – they meant his father, who had been saving up for the trip for the last four years, won’t be able to travel to Beijing to watch him compete.
“He was gutted about it,” Mouat says, “So I’m going to try and bring back a few collectors pins for him. And maybe something a bit more flashy too, like a medal.”
