Twenty years after Rhona Martin sent down her famous ‘Stone of Destiny’, Great Britain’s men’s curling team sealed a shot at Olympic gold with a nerve-shredding 8-4 semi-final win over the United States in Beijing.
Martin watched on from her BBC commentary booth as John Shuster’s missed takeout attempt in the final end guaranteed Bruce Mouat’s men a place in the final, where they will meet world champions Sweden on Saturday.
Earlier on a fantastic day for Great Britain at the National Aquatics Centre, Eve Muirhead’s women’s team squeezed into the semi-finals after a 9-4 win over Russia proved just enough to send them them through to the last four.
If Mouat’s men were strongly fancied to reach the final they were wary of Shuster’s rock-and-roll rink, the defending Olympic champions and the only team to have beaten them in their nine round-robin encounters.
But after fighting back from a nightmare start in which they conceded two with the ‘hammer’ in the first end, they led by a point at the halfway stage and forced a series of shut-out ends before building a position from which the Americans could not recover.
“It’s hard to put into words,” said Mouat. “I’m really proud of how we went about this week. We’ve played amazing to get to this point.
“I think for the reaction that I showed, the scream I did at the end, that was a release of tension and pressure.”
Saturday’s clash with the Swedes will be only the second time Great Britain have played in an Olympic final since Martin’s 2002 triumph, after team coach David Murdoch led his team to the silver medal in Sochi.
Referencing the historic Martin moment, Mouat added: “That’s such a big moment for curling back home. We really want to be able to replicate something like that. If we go out and play the game we’ve played all of this week, we’ll be close to being able to have a moment like that.”
Murdoch, whose own playing career petered out after three Olympics when he was controversially omitted for the Pyeongchang Games in 2018, found it hard to contain his emotions afterwards.
“I feel ecstatic,” said Murdoch. “It’s just incredible. The guys just had to grind that out a little bit. The Americans were very sharp and they threw absolutely everything at us.
“I saw Rhona waving from the stands, and that is a nice omen to have. Hopefully she can bring that ‘Stone of Destiny’ towards us.”
Earlier, Muirhead’s team pulled off a great escape and edged into the final by just 10 centimetres after a nailbiting end to the round-robin programme.
Muirhead, a bronze medallist in Sochi in 2014, went into the last match of the round-robin phase against the Russian Olympic Committee requiring at least three results to go her way in order to book a top-four spot.
The 31-year-old kept her side of the bargain with a brilliant double take-out in the penultimate end to score four and seal a 9-4 win, then waited nervously while Sweden beat South Korea in order to guarantee their place.
“We were in the mixed zone watching TV – I don’t think many of us could really watch the screen,” said team-mate Jennifer Dodds, who will now get a second shot at guaranteeing an Olympic medal after missing out in the mixed event.
“You never know and we were not 100 per cent sure. But when we got it confirmed it was more relief than anything else.”
