May 13, 2024 • 28 mins
From Executive Producer Ed Helms comes a new podcast, Broomgate: A Curling Scandal. Over the course of six episodes, semi-professional curler and fully professional comedian John Cullen (Blocked Party) is exposing the unbelievable, never-before-told scandal that rocked the sport of curling. Yes, curling. Listen here.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hello everyone, ed here. I'm delighted to share with you
as a very special sneak peak, the first episode of
another brand new podcast I executive produced. It's called Broomgate.
Over the course of six episodes, semi professional curler and
fully professional comedian, the amazing John Cullen is exposing the unbelievable,
(00:26):
never before told, true story of a scandal that rocked
the sport of curling. Yes, curling, ladies and gentlemen, this
story has all the intrigue and edge of your seatness
of a Hollywood blockbuster, and it's wildly funny because well,
at the end of the day, it's about brooms, which
(00:47):
is a type of sporting equipment in the sport of curling.
You get it. You can find Broomgate wherever you get
your podcasts starting May sixth, but for now here is
Broomgate Episode one.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Content warning. The following podcast contains mentions of brooms and
graphic depictions of curling. It's Thursday, September tenth, twenty fifteen,
and my phone is blowing up. My friends are all
texting me, John, are you seeing what's happening right now?
They tell me it's an emergency and I have to
(01:24):
turn on the TV.
Speaker 3 (01:36):
It is the Enti's Grand Slam of Curling on Sports
that and they are fired up for the first event
of two thy fifteen twenty sixteen, it's the Tour Challenge
in Paradise, duber Lamb and Labrador.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
Walking onto the ice is a man named Brad Gujou.
Ask most anyone in Canada to name a curler, and
whether you're into the Gamer not, they'll have heard of Brad.
If Brad isn't the Michael Jordan of curling, he might
be the Lebron James, the best curler of this generation
and someone who is innovating the sport on and off
(02:11):
the ice.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
The twelve time New Fland Men's champion, three time Grand
Slam champion, two thousand and six Olympic gold medalists from
Saint John's nupoun Land.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Seen the texts from my friends who are elite curlers
and broadcasters from around the world are telling me that
Brad is trying something that no one has ever seen before.
They can't figure out what the hell is going on,
and once I turn the TV on, neither can I.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
I'm sensing there's a favorite in the house. Maybe maybe not.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
All curling teams consist of four players. The skip is
in charge of the strategy for the team. The team's boss.
Brad Gugue is the skip of his team, and like
lots of bosses, he does an awful lot of yelling.
Speaker 4 (03:09):
Har fr as Brad Gushu was yelling hurry Now they're
using a theory. You're trying out a theory of where
what sweeper should sweep and on what kind of side
of the sliding surface.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
What Gugu is doing is he is using just one sweeper,
one sweeper this approach. That's what my friends were blowing
up my phone about. Curling teams always used two sweepers,
but during this game there's only one and we didn't
know why.
Speaker 4 (03:41):
So they were trying to hold that rock straighter by
having one sweeper on the outside sweeping card the other one.
Speaker 3 (03:47):
Not.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
What I'm seeing is Brad's team mate, Brat Gallant sweeping
the rock up the ice and him alone. The other
team was looking on in confusion, and so was I
sitting at home on the cow which I thought to myself,
what possible benefit could this have? It looked really strange.
While Brett madly swept in front of the rock as
it traveled down the ice. His sweeping partner, who would
(04:10):
normally be brushing along with him, was just kind of
walking beside the rock doing nothing, like he had just
given up.
Speaker 4 (04:18):
What do you think it of, Kevin.
Speaker 5 (04:21):
Well? I think the inside sweeper certainly shouldn't be on
the inside of the.
Speaker 6 (04:26):
Curve of the rock.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
Twenty ten Olympic gold medalist Kevin Martin was in the
broadcast booth that day.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
To not have the other person out front cleaning in
a frosty situation doesn't make a lot of sense.
Speaker 7 (04:37):
I don't think.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
But we'll see how it goes as the game progresses.
Speaker 5 (04:40):
But it may be a theory that maybe shared that Charlotte.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
But Kevin was wrong. Within weeks, every competitive curling team
on the planet would switch to using one sweeper. It
wasn't because they were lazy, It wasn't because the rocks
or the ice changed. It was because of one thing,
and one thing only, a.
Speaker 5 (05:05):
Broom, a new super broom made of a mysterious material
never used before, and that broom, combined with the one
sweeper technique, would lead to the biggest scandal in curling history.
This is Broomgate, the story of how a broom almost
(05:26):
killed curling. When I say the word broomgate, what does
(05:49):
that mean to you?
Speaker 6 (05:51):
That's when that tight knit fabric amongst the top competitive
teams started to be ripped apart.
Speaker 5 (05:58):
I think some.
Speaker 8 (05:58):
Friendships were ended.
Speaker 9 (06:00):
This is a mess, very stressful, a lot of sleepless nights.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
It felt super personal because it was being held a.
Speaker 10 (06:07):
Cheater when your first went out the door.
Speaker 6 (06:10):
Because you're gonna get bloody, people are gonna come.
Speaker 7 (06:12):
After you like it was just toxic.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
It was so toxic.
Speaker 11 (06:17):
Her very stressful, traumatic curling season, my least fun curling
season of my entire career.
Speaker 7 (06:23):
It was the It was a year I'd like to forget.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
While some people might have wanted to forget about broomgate,
there was no way not once the controversy hit late
night TV.
Speaker 12 (06:41):
Folks, this is one sports controversy you can't just sweep
under the rug. I bristle left the idea. I try
to brush off the allegations all you want, but this
sort of thing doesn't happen in a vacuum.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
It took just two months for this scandal to move
beyond the world of curling. By November of t twenty fifteen,
The New York Times, CNN and The Washington Post had
picked up on the story. Stephen Colbert did a full
six minute segment on it.
Speaker 8 (07:09):
The point is, I'm a curling purist. As far as
I'm concerned, it's all gone downhill ever since they started
playing indoors. I prefer the original sixteenth century Scottish rules.
Just a group of guys on a frozen pond, hurling
flat bottom river stones and probably falling through the ice.
Speaker 12 (07:24):
Whoever doesn't die wins. Now that's a sport.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
My name is John Cullen. If you're the kind of
curling sicco who knows who finished second at the twenty
fifteen British Columbia Curling Championships, well then you might have
heard of me. I was what's commonly referred to as
a Tier two curler. My team went a handful of
World Curling Tour events, a modest amount of cash, and
peaked at number thirty in the world. I have seven
(07:51):
provincial medals to my name, and none of them are gold.
I started curling when I was twelve. I had always
been intrigued by seeing it on TV, and when my
grade seven teacher took our class to a curling rink
one day. I loved it. The physicality of the sport
appealed to me as a lifelong hockey player, and the
strategic aspect of the sport appealed to me has a
(08:12):
lifelong nerd. Soon enough, curling became my main thing. In
high school, I practiced so much that the icemaker of
my local curling club gave me a set of keys.
As an adult, I spent all my time off of
work going to curling tournaments. Look my email address was
culinthecurler at hotmail dot com. For twenty years, the sport
was my life, and I loved every minute of it.
(08:35):
Well except for one year. It was twenty fifteen, the
year of Broomegate. It was a complete disaster. All my
friends were fighting with each other, people were screaming at
me online. Would have been previously described as a gentleman's
game was anything but. And now eight years later, no
one talks about it. The full story has never been told,
(09:00):
So I'm gonna tell it. I love curling, always have.
I don't want this to happen again, so maybe if
we talk about it, it won't.
Speaker 10 (09:21):
Curling, like love, is a disease of the mind.
Speaker 8 (09:25):
One needs a cardigan, a comfortable cap, rubbers, a broom,
and stones stones a broom.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
If you're just catching up, Ah yeah, a broom. It's
the most important piece of equipment in curling.
Speaker 13 (09:41):
Fundamentals of a good curling delivery don't change the position
of the head, shoulders, or body, except to elevate them
by straightening the knees.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
This sweet, very Canadian film from nineteen sixty three shows
us one fundamental thing about curling. Very little has changed.
Curling is actually considered to be one of the oldest
team sports known to man. A stone was found in
Scotland with the date fifteen eleven inscribed on it.
Speaker 13 (10:07):
Oh sure, keep your foot in the hack, use it
to push off.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
The basic rules haven't changed in hundreds of years. The
key is to have more stones stay in the bull's
eye known as the house at the end of the
game than your opponents. To do that, every member of
the team gets their turn at being the shooter and
moving the rock down the ice. But once that rock
is let go, it's in the sweeper's hands to make
it perfect.
Speaker 4 (10:33):
Slide the stone easily. Let the weight of the stone
work for you.
Speaker 8 (10:37):
Keep your eye on the broom I've got it easy enough.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
For most of my career, I was considered a pretty
good sweeper, and for nearly a decade, Jay Wakefield was
my sweeping partner.
Speaker 7 (10:51):
I'm an introverted person, so like having less people to
interact with. This is always a better thing.
Speaker 3 (10:56):
For me.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
To talk to Jay about the ripple effect of the
one sweeper technique and our years sweeping together.
Speaker 7 (11:05):
I've always just played with my best friends. I've never
I've only had a handful of teams where, you know,
maybe me and another guy on the team didn't really
get along.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
But to be clear, I wasn't one of the guys
you didn't like.
Speaker 10 (11:18):
You were not.
Speaker 7 (11:19):
No, It's hard to go ten years playing with the
same guy if you don't like you don't like them.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
This is very true, and it's especially true when it
comes to me and Jay.
Speaker 7 (11:29):
So obviously not just that you spend a lot of
time together, but you spend a lot of time on
the ice together. You spend every shot in each other's face,
talking to each other. It is just a lot of
constant communication.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
My wife once told Jay that when she watches us
sweep together, it looks like we're kissing. Maybe subconsciously we
wanted to who knows, but what do you remember or
about the switch to one sweeper.
Speaker 7 (12:04):
I remember I was out doing something I can't remember what,
and my phone started to blow up with all my
curling friends being like you watching this. So I got
home and I looked, and I'm like, what the hell's
going on here? And it was all this kind of chaos.
For lack of a better word, we had absolutely no
(12:27):
idea really what the one sweeper thing was all about,
and like how to actually try to make it do
what they were doing.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
It took us a while to catch up, but like
every other competitive team at the time, we made the switch.
Speaker 7 (12:41):
Do you think.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
Curling like lost something a little bit when all of
a sudden, only one guy's now sweeping at a time.
Was some of that art kind of lost?
Speaker 7 (12:49):
Yeah? I think I did. I think at the time,
being a competitive sweeper, I felt like my job was
less sacred. I guess like some of the art was
gone and some of the skill was gone because all
of a sudden I could just like do whatever with
(13:11):
the broom and make the shot right.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
I feel that way too. It wasn't like the one
sweeper method took away all the skill I had developed
over two decades. Jay and I were still a team
within a team, but sweeping had become less of a
sacred bond between two teammates. And as I make my
way through this story, I do feel a sense of loss.
I think a lot of us did. But it wasn't
just the one sweeper technique that made us feel like
(13:36):
something had shifted. The reason we were all sweeping differently
was because of a broom. Over time, curling brooms have evolved. Originally,
they were like the brooms you'd find in your house
or with a witch's costume, made of corn or straw,
and mostly meant to remove debris from the ice. As
technology improved, they moved from corn to hair to what
(13:58):
we use today, something that looks like a swiffer, but
with a specialized fabric head. Over the last two decades,
broom manufacturers have experimented with different fabrics with varying results,
but no one started paying attention to broom technology until
two brothers, Archie and haratchman Avian, came along with a
broomhead that would change the game forever.
Speaker 13 (14:32):
Who's the older brother.
Speaker 6 (14:33):
Archie, I'm the little I'm ten years younger. Even though
I look ten years older, I'm ten years younger. That's
what happens when you work with them, you know.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
My producer Kathleen goldhar and I meet Archie and haratchman
Avian at the headquarters of Hardline, one of the world's
largest curling broom manufacturers. It's tucked away in a suburb
of Montreal, not far from the airport. Hardline's office belies
status is one of curling's big dogs. It's in a
one story building in the corner of an industrial park.
(15:06):
This is decidedly not the Nike World headquarters. Archie and
Harratch sit together behind one desk. It's cluttered with invoices,
loose sticky notes, and office equipment. Behind the brothers, the
wall is covered from top to bottom with team photos,
men and women holding their brooms, wearing t shirts with
Hardline emblazoned on them and metals around their necks, or
(15:28):
holding up trophies. There's no pretense with the brothers. They're
kind of rough speak. Their minds could even be intimidating
on initial meeting, but their warmth is contagious and the
love they have for each other is very close to
the surface.
Speaker 10 (15:43):
I don't know if i'd call myself a bully, but
this is Archie. Let's just say he grew up and
not taking my shit.
Speaker 2 (15:51):
He was a very good older brother.
Speaker 6 (15:53):
He showed me life, you know, showed me the ropes,
and he was always there, always had my back in
a lot of ways. And you know, I'm very grateful
to have an older brother like that. He basically, you know,
took care of me. I mean, we both lost our
dads when I was really young, so he was the
(16:17):
guy that made sure that I was on the right path.
Speaker 2 (16:20):
Her ats was sixteen, Archie twenty six when their dad
died in a car accident while on vacation in Armenia.
Speaker 7 (16:27):
It was sixteen.
Speaker 6 (16:28):
I remember I was in secondary four, which is what
tenth grade. I had final exams two weeks later after that,
and my brother was young too, so he was twenty
six and he had to go there and you know,
bring him back. Our mother was in the same car accident,
so we had to take care of her too at
(16:49):
the same time. So we grew up pretty fast.
Speaker 7 (16:52):
It's life.
Speaker 13 (16:53):
It happens, aren't professional curlers, right? How did you find
your way to hardline.
Speaker 9 (17:04):
Only in our heads.
Speaker 10 (17:05):
We're professional.
Speaker 9 (17:08):
We're professional armchair curlers, basically is what we are. Friend
of mine that I played ball with begged me for
ten years to go try it out. And I used
to tell him, you know, come on, man, it's for
old people. And I used to brush him off all
the time. In this one year I caved. I said,
you know what, just to shut you up, I'm going
to go in there and I'm going to try it
and then leave me alone. He said, no problem, and
(17:30):
I walked in the door, fell in love with the game,
and the rest is history.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
But before he discovered curling, Archie's life was all over
the place.
Speaker 9 (17:40):
I was on the path to become a ski bumb
Actually I was living in a Whistler and just enjoying life.
And came back and my father used to own a
small business and worked with him for a bit and
didn't like that. Then I went to work for a
friend of mine at a food company and really like
(18:00):
that too much.
Speaker 10 (18:01):
And I'm the kind of guy that needs to be outside.
I can't be indoors.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
So Archie found a job that took him outside.
Speaker 9 (18:10):
I was a what do you call it, a an
information distribution engineer, what does that mean.
Speaker 10 (18:23):
I was a mailman.
Speaker 9 (18:29):
He was a mailman for the Postal Service, and I
loved my job. It was a great job. It was
starting to wear on me, but it was never a
fact of I have to find something else.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
Their mother wasn't too excited about the way Archie's life
was going, and so she put pressure on her hatch
to make something of himself.
Speaker 10 (18:49):
She put her foot down with her hatch and made
him hit the books.
Speaker 9 (18:54):
And he actually made something of himself by getting an MBA,
going to work on Wall Street for fifteen years, and
he took on the big boys in.
Speaker 2 (19:03):
One so before Hardline was born, Archie the Mailman was
just a local curler who loved to hang with his
buddies after work and play a few games, then shoot
the shit over a beer, and her hatch was working
on Wall Street. The inspiration for Hardline came to Archie
in two thousand and nine when he was at a
bond Spiel, a fancy name for a curling tournament in
Charlotte Walquebec.
Speaker 9 (19:24):
There's a bond Spiel that everyone should attend once in
their lifetime, about an hour and a half outside Quebec city.
Speaker 2 (19:31):
At the bond Spiel, a curling legend named Randy Ferbey
and his team caught Archie's eye.
Speaker 9 (19:36):
They had these custom rooms, and our eyes were popping
out of our heads. We got the brilliant idea of
coming out with custom rooms at the time, and we
were on a high all weekend.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
And Archie would return home from Charlevois just buzzing, which
is funny because the broom he's talking about doesn't have
anything to do with performance, but rather just a custom
paint job done on an eg existing broom. And he
wasn't even imagining starting a custom curling broom empire. He
was just excited about the idea of making a bunch
of brooms for his team. But he very quickly hit
(20:10):
a snag.
Speaker 9 (20:11):
The ebrush artist told me it was going to be
roughly one hundred dollars.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
Of broom, so that would be too expensive.
Speaker 9 (20:17):
It was on a bit of a downer for a
week or two and I met a friend of mine
and he says, ah, you know, you look a little
bit down. And I told him the entire story, and
he said, well, what are these booms made of? And
I said, well, a carbon fiber And he tells me
he's got a friend of the carbon fiber business.
Speaker 10 (20:33):
You know, why don't you give him a call.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
The good news was that this guy could make the
brooms for cheaper. The bad news was that he'd have
to make a bulk order. So he called one of
his curling buddies, Stan Pong with a proposal.
Speaker 9 (20:45):
Listen, we should really try this out. You know, we'll
make a few hundred brooms and if they sell, they sell,
and if they don't, well, it is what it is.
And so we basically got I think at that time
it was seven guys to pitch and five hundred dollars,
and uh hardline was born.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
Archie had unintentionally launched a curling broom company, but so
far all he had were broom handles. A broom is
nothing without its head. When it comes to curling, the
head is crazy important. It's what helps to control the
rock as it travels down the ice. Sweeping reduces the
friction between the rock and the ice, allowing it to
travel further and straighter. While curling had evolved to synthetic
(21:29):
fabric broomheads, there were always issues with the fabric wearing
down and with the repeated use in the gathering of
frost on the head. A lot of brooms weren't nearly
as effective as they could have been, so Archie started
to shop around for the best head he could find
to put on his carbon fiber handles. He could have
just licensed a broomhead from an existing manufacturer, but that's
not the Archie way.
Speaker 9 (21:51):
At that time, we were getting handed lots of heads
to try out, saying, man, it was the best head
on the market, and I had told them that, you
know what, I'm gonna try give it a and give
you a review on it. And basically they weren't really
that good.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
Archie kept turning down broomheads presented to him. That's until
he met with a mysterious inventor who showed Archie something
a little bit different.
Speaker 9 (22:13):
The ice pad was basically put into my hands and
they said, like, you got to try this, So I
tried it. The ease of sweeping of the ice pad
and the fact that the fabric you could clean it,
whereas the other pads on the market once they got
dirty you have to change them because they're useless. I said,
this is going to be like really really good. And
(22:36):
I said, well, listen, if you were to give me
worldwide exclusivity on selling this. I think we can make
this work and he said sure, and that's how it
all started.
Speaker 2 (22:50):
Archie named his new head the ice pad, A new
broomhead made of an unidentified fabric by an unidentified inventor.
Speaker 13 (23:01):
Who handed you the ice pad?
Speaker 9 (23:03):
Well, the inventor? Who's that the inventor?
Speaker 7 (23:06):
Why won't you tell us that is?
Speaker 5 (23:09):
No? I think it's not.
Speaker 13 (23:11):
I don't understand why we want to keep his name secret.
Speaker 10 (23:14):
Well, why do you want to know the name, because.
Speaker 13 (23:16):
He invented this great thing. I want to talk to
him about what he invented and what do you did?
Speaker 10 (23:20):
Well, you can look it up.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
We did look it up. We couldn't find the inventor.
As you might imagine, information on inventors who specialize in
finding the best possible fabric for a curling broom is
not so readily available. But what we do know is
that this broom material is incredibly versatile, strong, and water proof.
It makes sweeping feel easy, a little too easy, so
(23:50):
easy that you only need one sweeper. This now brings
us back to the twenty fifteen to sixteen season, Me
sitting on the couch with my phone going crazy watching
that Grand Slam in Newfoundland where Brad Guju and his
team stepped out onto the ice and changed the game forever.
(24:14):
But it wasn't just the one sweeper technique they were
showing off for the first time. It was the powerful
magic of Hardlines broom.
Speaker 11 (24:21):
All you got to do is put the broom in
front of the rock, and the rock starts going whatever
direction you want. Brad Guju, if everybody can't figure it out,
they're idiots. But we're not going to tell everybody, but
we're gonna show you. We're going to show you the
impact that these could have.
Speaker 2 (24:38):
The broom could take the rock in quote whatever direction
you want. And Hardline sponsored players had been using the
broom for a couple of years now, and the curling
community started to wonder was it giving them an unfair advantage.
Speaker 6 (24:53):
The problem is there's a whole lack of trust now
among the players. There was a great camaraderie among the
players out here on the tour, and there's a it's
a big divisor now and that's kind of sad for
the sport to be.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
Frank Quickly, suspicions around this broom started to tear at
the very fabric of my community. You know the problem
between the teams that you know, guys that were friends,
uh recently, they're not talking.
Speaker 7 (25:18):
To each other.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
Is this sport becoming cutthroat? Is money changing this sport?
But here's the thing, there's something I haven't told you.
Years before, Brad showed the world what this broom could do.
I was one of the first curlers to use a
Hardline broom and I loved it. I told all my
curling friends about it. And so when Hardline wanted some
(25:41):
star power, I convinced one of my friends, who just
so happened to be one of the best curlers in
the world, to use the broom And little did I
know what would happen next. Call it what you want,
call it the butterfly effect, call me patient zero. The
first domino that I'm here to tell you I might
(26:01):
have caused broomgate this season. On broom Gate, was there
(26:25):
ever a thought in your mind that they were cheating?
Speaker 11 (26:29):
The thought crossed our mind where they were aware of
this and they hit it.
Speaker 12 (26:35):
This type of technology is going to ruin the sport.
Speaker 7 (26:37):
So hard to deal with that because we wanted the
technology race to stop.
Speaker 11 (26:42):
It was awful.
Speaker 9 (26:42):
It was so unpleasant to be at trailing events, which
is usually I just said, it's my favorite part of
the game.
Speaker 10 (26:47):
He goes, this is these brooms, this is what we're
dealing with.
Speaker 7 (26:50):
You can manipulate this rock that gets on a Joystad.
We feel like we're bringing a knife to a gunfight.
Speaker 9 (26:55):
And that's when I said, these guys want a war,
I'm gonna give them a war.
Speaker 10 (26:59):
They're never gonna forget.
Speaker 2 (27:09):
Broogate is a production of USG Audio and CBC in
association with Pacific Electric and Kelly and Kelly. Hosted by
me John Cullen and concept devised by John Cullen and
Kelly and Kelly. Showrunner is Kathleen goldhar Executive producers are
Josh Block from USG Audio, Mike Falbo, Ed Helms and
Brett Harris from Pacific Electric, Chris Kelly, Lauren Berkovich and
(27:32):
Pat Kelly from Kelly and Kelly, Chris Oak and Cecil
Fernandez from CBC and John Cullen. Assistant editor is Max Collins.
Editor is Mitchell Stewart. Production support from Josh la Longhi
at USG Audio. Veronica Simmons is our senior producer. Our
theme song is by Chris Kelly. Tanya Springer is Senior
(27:53):
manager and R. F. Narani is the Director of CBC Podcasts.
Thanks for listening to Broomgate. If you want to hear
the next episode right now, subscribe to our channel on
Apple Podcasts. Just click on the link in the show description.
Hello everyone, ed here. I'm delighted to share with you
as a very special sneak peak, the first episode of
another brand new podcast I executive produced. It's called Broomgate.
Over the course of six episodes, semi professional curler and
fully professional comedian, the amazing John Cullen is exposing the unbelievable,
(00:26):
never before told, true story of a scandal that rocked
the sport of curling. Yes, curling, ladies and gentlemen, this
story has all the intrigue and edge of your seatness
of a Hollywood blockbuster, and it's wildly funny because well,
at the end of the day, it's about brooms, which
(00:47):
is a type of sporting equipment in the sport of curling.
You get it. You can find Broomgate wherever you get
your podcasts starting May sixth, but for now here is
Broomgate Episode one.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Content warning. The following podcast contains mentions of brooms and
graphic depictions of curling. It's Thursday, September tenth, twenty fifteen,
and my phone is blowing up. My friends are all
texting me, John, are you seeing what's happening right now?
They tell me it's an emergency and I have to
(01:24):
turn on the TV.
Speaker 3 (01:36):
It is the Enti's Grand Slam of Curling on Sports
that and they are fired up for the first event
of two thy fifteen twenty sixteen, it's the Tour Challenge
in Paradise, duber Lamb and Labrador.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
Walking onto the ice is a man named Brad Gujou.
Ask most anyone in Canada to name a curler, and
whether you're into the Gamer not, they'll have heard of Brad.
If Brad isn't the Michael Jordan of curling, he might
be the Lebron James, the best curler of this generation
and someone who is innovating the sport on and off
(02:11):
the ice.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
The twelve time New Fland Men's champion, three time Grand
Slam champion, two thousand and six Olympic gold medalists from
Saint John's nupoun Land.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Seen the texts from my friends who are elite curlers
and broadcasters from around the world are telling me that
Brad is trying something that no one has ever seen before.
They can't figure out what the hell is going on,
and once I turn the TV on, neither can I.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
I'm sensing there's a favorite in the house. Maybe maybe not.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
All curling teams consist of four players. The skip is
in charge of the strategy for the team. The team's boss.
Brad Gugue is the skip of his team, and like
lots of bosses, he does an awful lot of yelling.
Speaker 4 (03:09):
Har fr as Brad Gushu was yelling hurry Now they're
using a theory. You're trying out a theory of where
what sweeper should sweep and on what kind of side
of the sliding surface.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
What Gugu is doing is he is using just one sweeper,
one sweeper this approach. That's what my friends were blowing
up my phone about. Curling teams always used two sweepers,
but during this game there's only one and we didn't
know why.
Speaker 4 (03:41):
So they were trying to hold that rock straighter by
having one sweeper on the outside sweeping card the other one.
Speaker 3 (03:47):
Not.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
What I'm seeing is Brad's team mate, Brat Gallant sweeping
the rock up the ice and him alone. The other
team was looking on in confusion, and so was I
sitting at home on the cow which I thought to myself,
what possible benefit could this have? It looked really strange.
While Brett madly swept in front of the rock as
it traveled down the ice. His sweeping partner, who would
(04:10):
normally be brushing along with him, was just kind of
walking beside the rock doing nothing, like he had just
given up.
Speaker 4 (04:18):
What do you think it of, Kevin.
Speaker 5 (04:21):
Well? I think the inside sweeper certainly shouldn't be on
the inside of the.
Speaker 6 (04:26):
Curve of the rock.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
Twenty ten Olympic gold medalist Kevin Martin was in the
broadcast booth that day.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
To not have the other person out front cleaning in
a frosty situation doesn't make a lot of sense.
Speaker 7 (04:37):
I don't think.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
But we'll see how it goes as the game progresses.
Speaker 5 (04:40):
But it may be a theory that maybe shared that Charlotte.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
But Kevin was wrong. Within weeks, every competitive curling team
on the planet would switch to using one sweeper. It
wasn't because they were lazy, It wasn't because the rocks
or the ice changed. It was because of one thing,
and one thing only, a.
Speaker 5 (05:05):
Broom, a new super broom made of a mysterious material
never used before, and that broom, combined with the one
sweeper technique, would lead to the biggest scandal in curling history.
This is Broomgate, the story of how a broom almost
(05:26):
killed curling. When I say the word broomgate, what does
(05:49):
that mean to you?
Speaker 6 (05:51):
That's when that tight knit fabric amongst the top competitive
teams started to be ripped apart.
Speaker 5 (05:58):
I think some.
Speaker 8 (05:58):
Friendships were ended.
Speaker 9 (06:00):
This is a mess, very stressful, a lot of sleepless nights.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
It felt super personal because it was being held a.
Speaker 10 (06:07):
Cheater when your first went out the door.
Speaker 6 (06:10):
Because you're gonna get bloody, people are gonna come.
Speaker 7 (06:12):
After you like it was just toxic.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
It was so toxic.
Speaker 11 (06:17):
Her very stressful, traumatic curling season, my least fun curling
season of my entire career.
Speaker 7 (06:23):
It was the It was a year I'd like to forget.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
While some people might have wanted to forget about broomgate,
there was no way not once the controversy hit late
night TV.
Speaker 12 (06:41):
Folks, this is one sports controversy you can't just sweep
under the rug. I bristle left the idea. I try
to brush off the allegations all you want, but this
sort of thing doesn't happen in a vacuum.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
It took just two months for this scandal to move
beyond the world of curling. By November of t twenty fifteen,
The New York Times, CNN and The Washington Post had
picked up on the story. Stephen Colbert did a full
six minute segment on it.
Speaker 8 (07:09):
The point is, I'm a curling purist. As far as
I'm concerned, it's all gone downhill ever since they started
playing indoors. I prefer the original sixteenth century Scottish rules.
Just a group of guys on a frozen pond, hurling
flat bottom river stones and probably falling through the ice.
Speaker 12 (07:24):
Whoever doesn't die wins. Now that's a sport.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
My name is John Cullen. If you're the kind of
curling sicco who knows who finished second at the twenty
fifteen British Columbia Curling Championships, well then you might have
heard of me. I was what's commonly referred to as
a Tier two curler. My team went a handful of
World Curling Tour events, a modest amount of cash, and
peaked at number thirty in the world. I have seven
(07:51):
provincial medals to my name, and none of them are gold.
I started curling when I was twelve. I had always
been intrigued by seeing it on TV, and when my
grade seven teacher took our class to a curling rink
one day. I loved it. The physicality of the sport
appealed to me as a lifelong hockey player, and the
strategic aspect of the sport appealed to me has a
(08:12):
lifelong nerd. Soon enough, curling became my main thing. In
high school, I practiced so much that the icemaker of
my local curling club gave me a set of keys.
As an adult, I spent all my time off of
work going to curling tournaments. Look my email address was
culinthecurler at hotmail dot com. For twenty years, the sport
was my life, and I loved every minute of it.
(08:35):
Well except for one year. It was twenty fifteen, the
year of Broomegate. It was a complete disaster. All my
friends were fighting with each other, people were screaming at
me online. Would have been previously described as a gentleman's
game was anything but. And now eight years later, no
one talks about it. The full story has never been told,
(09:00):
So I'm gonna tell it. I love curling, always have.
I don't want this to happen again, so maybe if
we talk about it, it won't.
Speaker 10 (09:21):
Curling, like love, is a disease of the mind.
Speaker 8 (09:25):
One needs a cardigan, a comfortable cap, rubbers, a broom,
and stones stones a broom.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
If you're just catching up, Ah yeah, a broom. It's
the most important piece of equipment in curling.
Speaker 13 (09:41):
Fundamentals of a good curling delivery don't change the position
of the head, shoulders, or body, except to elevate them
by straightening the knees.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
This sweet, very Canadian film from nineteen sixty three shows
us one fundamental thing about curling. Very little has changed.
Curling is actually considered to be one of the oldest
team sports known to man. A stone was found in
Scotland with the date fifteen eleven inscribed on it.
Speaker 13 (10:07):
Oh sure, keep your foot in the hack, use it
to push off.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
The basic rules haven't changed in hundreds of years. The
key is to have more stones stay in the bull's
eye known as the house at the end of the
game than your opponents. To do that, every member of
the team gets their turn at being the shooter and
moving the rock down the ice. But once that rock
is let go, it's in the sweeper's hands to make
it perfect.
Speaker 4 (10:33):
Slide the stone easily. Let the weight of the stone
work for you.
Speaker 8 (10:37):
Keep your eye on the broom I've got it easy enough.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
For most of my career, I was considered a pretty
good sweeper, and for nearly a decade, Jay Wakefield was
my sweeping partner.
Speaker 7 (10:51):
I'm an introverted person, so like having less people to
interact with. This is always a better thing.
Speaker 3 (10:56):
For me.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
To talk to Jay about the ripple effect of the
one sweeper technique and our years sweeping together.
Speaker 7 (11:05):
I've always just played with my best friends. I've never
I've only had a handful of teams where, you know,
maybe me and another guy on the team didn't really
get along.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
But to be clear, I wasn't one of the guys
you didn't like.
Speaker 10 (11:18):
You were not.
Speaker 7 (11:19):
No, It's hard to go ten years playing with the
same guy if you don't like you don't like them.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
This is very true, and it's especially true when it
comes to me and Jay.
Speaker 7 (11:29):
So obviously not just that you spend a lot of
time together, but you spend a lot of time on
the ice together. You spend every shot in each other's face,
talking to each other. It is just a lot of
constant communication.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
My wife once told Jay that when she watches us
sweep together, it looks like we're kissing. Maybe subconsciously we
wanted to who knows, but what do you remember or
about the switch to one sweeper.
Speaker 7 (12:04):
I remember I was out doing something I can't remember what,
and my phone started to blow up with all my
curling friends being like you watching this. So I got
home and I looked, and I'm like, what the hell's
going on here? And it was all this kind of chaos.
For lack of a better word, we had absolutely no
(12:27):
idea really what the one sweeper thing was all about,
and like how to actually try to make it do
what they were doing.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
It took us a while to catch up, but like
every other competitive team at the time, we made the switch.
Speaker 7 (12:41):
Do you think.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
Curling like lost something a little bit when all of
a sudden, only one guy's now sweeping at a time.
Was some of that art kind of lost?
Speaker 7 (12:49):
Yeah? I think I did. I think at the time,
being a competitive sweeper, I felt like my job was
less sacred. I guess like some of the art was
gone and some of the skill was gone because all
of a sudden I could just like do whatever with
(13:11):
the broom and make the shot right.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
I feel that way too. It wasn't like the one
sweeper method took away all the skill I had developed
over two decades. Jay and I were still a team
within a team, but sweeping had become less of a
sacred bond between two teammates. And as I make my
way through this story, I do feel a sense of loss.
I think a lot of us did. But it wasn't
just the one sweeper technique that made us feel like
(13:36):
something had shifted. The reason we were all sweeping differently
was because of a broom. Over time, curling brooms have evolved. Originally,
they were like the brooms you'd find in your house
or with a witch's costume, made of corn or straw,
and mostly meant to remove debris from the ice. As
technology improved, they moved from corn to hair to what
(13:58):
we use today, something that looks like a swiffer, but
with a specialized fabric head. Over the last two decades,
broom manufacturers have experimented with different fabrics with varying results,
but no one started paying attention to broom technology until
two brothers, Archie and haratchman Avian, came along with a
broomhead that would change the game forever.
Speaker 13 (14:32):
Who's the older brother.
Speaker 6 (14:33):
Archie, I'm the little I'm ten years younger. Even though
I look ten years older, I'm ten years younger. That's
what happens when you work with them, you know.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
My producer Kathleen goldhar and I meet Archie and haratchman
Avian at the headquarters of Hardline, one of the world's
largest curling broom manufacturers. It's tucked away in a suburb
of Montreal, not far from the airport. Hardline's office belies
status is one of curling's big dogs. It's in a
one story building in the corner of an industrial park.
(15:06):
This is decidedly not the Nike World headquarters. Archie and
Harratch sit together behind one desk. It's cluttered with invoices,
loose sticky notes, and office equipment. Behind the brothers, the
wall is covered from top to bottom with team photos,
men and women holding their brooms, wearing t shirts with
Hardline emblazoned on them and metals around their necks, or
(15:28):
holding up trophies. There's no pretense with the brothers. They're
kind of rough speak. Their minds could even be intimidating
on initial meeting, but their warmth is contagious and the
love they have for each other is very close to
the surface.
Speaker 10 (15:43):
I don't know if i'd call myself a bully, but
this is Archie. Let's just say he grew up and
not taking my shit.
Speaker 2 (15:51):
He was a very good older brother.
Speaker 6 (15:53):
He showed me life, you know, showed me the ropes,
and he was always there, always had my back in
a lot of ways. And you know, I'm very grateful
to have an older brother like that. He basically, you know,
took care of me. I mean, we both lost our
dads when I was really young, so he was the
(16:17):
guy that made sure that I was on the right path.
Speaker 2 (16:20):
Her ats was sixteen, Archie twenty six when their dad
died in a car accident while on vacation in Armenia.
Speaker 7 (16:27):
It was sixteen.
Speaker 6 (16:28):
I remember I was in secondary four, which is what
tenth grade. I had final exams two weeks later after that,
and my brother was young too, so he was twenty
six and he had to go there and you know,
bring him back. Our mother was in the same car accident,
so we had to take care of her too at
(16:49):
the same time. So we grew up pretty fast.
Speaker 7 (16:52):
It's life.
Speaker 13 (16:53):
It happens, aren't professional curlers, right? How did you find
your way to hardline.
Speaker 9 (17:04):
Only in our heads.
Speaker 10 (17:05):
We're professional.
Speaker 9 (17:08):
We're professional armchair curlers, basically is what we are. Friend
of mine that I played ball with begged me for
ten years to go try it out. And I used
to tell him, you know, come on, man, it's for
old people. And I used to brush him off all
the time. In this one year I caved. I said,
you know what, just to shut you up, I'm going
to go in there and I'm going to try it
and then leave me alone. He said, no problem, and
(17:30):
I walked in the door, fell in love with the game,
and the rest is history.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
But before he discovered curling, Archie's life was all over
the place.
Speaker 9 (17:40):
I was on the path to become a ski bumb
Actually I was living in a Whistler and just enjoying life.
And came back and my father used to own a
small business and worked with him for a bit and
didn't like that. Then I went to work for a
friend of mine at a food company and really like
(18:00):
that too much.
Speaker 10 (18:01):
And I'm the kind of guy that needs to be outside.
I can't be indoors.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
So Archie found a job that took him outside.
Speaker 9 (18:10):
I was a what do you call it, a an
information distribution engineer, what does that mean.
Speaker 10 (18:23):
I was a mailman.
Speaker 9 (18:29):
He was a mailman for the Postal Service, and I
loved my job. It was a great job. It was
starting to wear on me, but it was never a
fact of I have to find something else.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
Their mother wasn't too excited about the way Archie's life
was going, and so she put pressure on her hatch
to make something of himself.
Speaker 10 (18:49):
She put her foot down with her hatch and made
him hit the books.
Speaker 9 (18:54):
And he actually made something of himself by getting an MBA,
going to work on Wall Street for fifteen years, and
he took on the big boys in.
Speaker 2 (19:03):
One so before Hardline was born, Archie the Mailman was
just a local curler who loved to hang with his
buddies after work and play a few games, then shoot
the shit over a beer, and her hatch was working
on Wall Street. The inspiration for Hardline came to Archie
in two thousand and nine when he was at a
bond Spiel, a fancy name for a curling tournament in
Charlotte Walquebec.
Speaker 9 (19:24):
There's a bond Spiel that everyone should attend once in
their lifetime, about an hour and a half outside Quebec city.
Speaker 2 (19:31):
At the bond Spiel, a curling legend named Randy Ferbey
and his team caught Archie's eye.
Speaker 9 (19:36):
They had these custom rooms, and our eyes were popping
out of our heads. We got the brilliant idea of
coming out with custom rooms at the time, and we
were on a high all weekend.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
And Archie would return home from Charlevois just buzzing, which
is funny because the broom he's talking about doesn't have
anything to do with performance, but rather just a custom
paint job done on an eg existing broom. And he
wasn't even imagining starting a custom curling broom empire. He
was just excited about the idea of making a bunch
of brooms for his team. But he very quickly hit
(20:10):
a snag.
Speaker 9 (20:11):
The ebrush artist told me it was going to be
roughly one hundred dollars.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
Of broom, so that would be too expensive.
Speaker 9 (20:17):
It was on a bit of a downer for a
week or two and I met a friend of mine
and he says, ah, you know, you look a little
bit down. And I told him the entire story, and
he said, well, what are these booms made of? And
I said, well, a carbon fiber And he tells me
he's got a friend of the carbon fiber business.
Speaker 10 (20:33):
You know, why don't you give him a call.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
The good news was that this guy could make the
brooms for cheaper. The bad news was that he'd have
to make a bulk order. So he called one of
his curling buddies, Stan Pong with a proposal.
Speaker 9 (20:45):
Listen, we should really try this out. You know, we'll
make a few hundred brooms and if they sell, they sell,
and if they don't, well, it is what it is.
And so we basically got I think at that time
it was seven guys to pitch and five hundred dollars,
and uh hardline was born.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
Archie had unintentionally launched a curling broom company, but so
far all he had were broom handles. A broom is
nothing without its head. When it comes to curling, the
head is crazy important. It's what helps to control the
rock as it travels down the ice. Sweeping reduces the
friction between the rock and the ice, allowing it to
travel further and straighter. While curling had evolved to synthetic
(21:29):
fabric broomheads, there were always issues with the fabric wearing
down and with the repeated use in the gathering of
frost on the head. A lot of brooms weren't nearly
as effective as they could have been, so Archie started
to shop around for the best head he could find
to put on his carbon fiber handles. He could have
just licensed a broomhead from an existing manufacturer, but that's
not the Archie way.
Speaker 9 (21:51):
At that time, we were getting handed lots of heads
to try out, saying, man, it was the best head
on the market, and I had told them that, you
know what, I'm gonna try give it a and give
you a review on it. And basically they weren't really
that good.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
Archie kept turning down broomheads presented to him. That's until
he met with a mysterious inventor who showed Archie something
a little bit different.
Speaker 9 (22:13):
The ice pad was basically put into my hands and
they said, like, you got to try this, So I
tried it. The ease of sweeping of the ice pad
and the fact that the fabric you could clean it,
whereas the other pads on the market once they got
dirty you have to change them because they're useless. I said,
this is going to be like really really good. And
(22:36):
I said, well, listen, if you were to give me
worldwide exclusivity on selling this. I think we can make
this work and he said sure, and that's how it
all started.
Speaker 2 (22:50):
Archie named his new head the ice pad, A new
broomhead made of an unidentified fabric by an unidentified inventor.
Speaker 13 (23:01):
Who handed you the ice pad?
Speaker 9 (23:03):
Well, the inventor? Who's that the inventor?
Speaker 7 (23:06):
Why won't you tell us that is?
Speaker 5 (23:09):
No? I think it's not.
Speaker 13 (23:11):
I don't understand why we want to keep his name secret.
Speaker 10 (23:14):
Well, why do you want to know the name, because.
Speaker 13 (23:16):
He invented this great thing. I want to talk to
him about what he invented and what do you did?
Speaker 10 (23:20):
Well, you can look it up.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
We did look it up. We couldn't find the inventor.
As you might imagine, information on inventors who specialize in
finding the best possible fabric for a curling broom is
not so readily available. But what we do know is
that this broom material is incredibly versatile, strong, and water proof.
It makes sweeping feel easy, a little too easy, so
(23:50):
easy that you only need one sweeper. This now brings
us back to the twenty fifteen to sixteen season, Me
sitting on the couch with my phone going crazy watching
that Grand Slam in Newfoundland where Brad Guju and his
team stepped out onto the ice and changed the game forever.
(24:14):
But it wasn't just the one sweeper technique they were
showing off for the first time. It was the powerful
magic of Hardlines broom.
Speaker 11 (24:21):
All you got to do is put the broom in
front of the rock, and the rock starts going whatever
direction you want. Brad Guju, if everybody can't figure it out,
they're idiots. But we're not going to tell everybody, but
we're gonna show you. We're going to show you the
impact that these could have.
Speaker 2 (24:38):
The broom could take the rock in quote whatever direction
you want. And Hardline sponsored players had been using the
broom for a couple of years now, and the curling
community started to wonder was it giving them an unfair advantage.
Speaker 6 (24:53):
The problem is there's a whole lack of trust now
among the players. There was a great camaraderie among the
players out here on the tour, and there's a it's
a big divisor now and that's kind of sad for
the sport to be.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
Frank Quickly, suspicions around this broom started to tear at
the very fabric of my community. You know the problem
between the teams that you know, guys that were friends,
uh recently, they're not talking.
Speaker 7 (25:18):
To each other.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
Is this sport becoming cutthroat? Is money changing this sport?
But here's the thing, there's something I haven't told you.
Years before, Brad showed the world what this broom could do.
I was one of the first curlers to use a
Hardline broom and I loved it. I told all my
curling friends about it. And so when Hardline wanted some
(25:41):
star power, I convinced one of my friends, who just
so happened to be one of the best curlers in
the world, to use the broom And little did I
know what would happen next. Call it what you want,
call it the butterfly effect, call me patient zero. The
first domino that I'm here to tell you I might
(26:01):
have caused broomgate this season. On broom Gate, was there
(26:25):
ever a thought in your mind that they were cheating?
Speaker 11 (26:29):
The thought crossed our mind where they were aware of
this and they hit it.
Speaker 12 (26:35):
This type of technology is going to ruin the sport.
Speaker 7 (26:37):
So hard to deal with that because we wanted the
technology race to stop.
Speaker 11 (26:42):
It was awful.
Speaker 9 (26:42):
It was so unpleasant to be at trailing events, which
is usually I just said, it's my favorite part of
the game.
Speaker 10 (26:47):
He goes, this is these brooms, this is what we're
dealing with.
Speaker 7 (26:50):
You can manipulate this rock that gets on a Joystad.
We feel like we're bringing a knife to a gunfight.
Speaker 9 (26:55):
And that's when I said, these guys want a war,
I'm gonna give them a war.
Speaker 10 (26:59):
They're never gonna forget.
Speaker 2 (27:09):
Broogate is a production of USG Audio and CBC in
association with Pacific Electric and Kelly and Kelly. Hosted by
me John Cullen and concept devised by John Cullen and
Kelly and Kelly. Showrunner is Kathleen goldhar Executive producers are
Josh Block from USG Audio, Mike Falbo, Ed Helms and
Brett Harris from Pacific Electric, Chris Kelly, Lauren Berkovich and
(27:32):
Pat Kelly from Kelly and Kelly, Chris Oak and Cecil
Fernandez from CBC and John Cullen. Assistant editor is Max Collins.
Editor is Mitchell Stewart. Production support from Josh la Longhi
at USG Audio. Veronica Simmons is our senior producer. Our
theme song is by Chris Kelly. Tanya Springer is Senior
(27:53):
manager and R. F. Narani is the Director of CBC Podcasts.
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