The story of curling's biggest scandal has never been told — until now

The sport of curling is centuries-old, and norms of sportsmanship and honour run so deep that in all that time, there hasn't really been a major conflict — well, except for that one time in 2015 where a brand new broom threatened to destroy the whole thing. 

That notorious season is the subject of a new CBC podcast, Broomgate: A Curling Scandal, hosted by semi-professional curler and fully professional comedian John Cullen. The new broom technology ushered in new sweeping techniques and altered the style of play so completely, it spun curling into an existential crisis.

Curlers have been reluctant to talk until now, Cullen says, largely due to the animosity around this time period.

"It felt to me like time had healed most of those wounds so people would feel comfortable talking about it, and that it wasn't so long ago that everyone would've forgotten what happened," said Cullen. 

• Listen to the podcast now.

We spoke to Cullen about why he decided to make this podcast and what he learned during the process.

You are a semi-professional curler yourself. How did you first get into curling?

I started in elementary school. My school had this very cool program I've never heard of anyone else ever doing, but four Fridays out of the year, our regular learning was replaced by a thing called electives, where each teacher had to come up with a morning and afternoon activity to get kids to sign up for and take. It could be as simple as badminton in the gym or as weird as going to circus school. One of my teachers was a curler so two of the four afternoon sessions involved them taking some kids curling. I'd always been interested, having seen it on TV, and I immediately fell in love with it.

For the non-curlers out there — how seismic were these events of 2015?

Despite it being 8 years ago now, there were some people who still refused to talk to us about it. Curling has always governed itself mainly with a moral code, and less so with a rulebook, and when that moral code got pushed to the brink, lots of people did not handle it well, and don't want to reckon with that. Some of these feelings ran very deep at the time, and still run very deep now. It's a wound that will never fully heal for some people.

With that reticence in the curling community around this scandal, how did you get people to open up to you? 

I think it's a few things. First of all, I played competitively for a long time. I've shared the ice with a lot of these people, competing with and against them. It's not some random sports journalist coming in and trying to understand this world and maybe not getting some of the nuance. Curlers trust me and they know that I know about this world and I can make sense of it. I've also been working in curling media —yes, that exists — for the last decade or so, and so a lot of the people we talked to for this project are people I've talked to before, and again, have a level of trust in me that I'll deliver their story in the best way possible.

How did the medium of podcasting help tell this story?

I think there's a freedom in the podcasting process that doesn't exist in say, documentary filmmaking. With filmmaking, there's always going to be a bit of guardedness on behalf of the subjects, and why wouldn't there be? Cameras and lights in your face, 10 people all in the room with you, it's hard. With podcasting, we were mostly three people sat around a kitchen table, or at a curling club, or in these people's homes. Yes, there's a microphone, but I think the feeling of that quickly goes away and there's an intimacy in podcasting you can't get with other media. You could write a book about it, but then it's not in the subject's exact voice, and it's not the same. It was the perfect medium for this story on such a touchy subject where we got people to really open up to us and nothing feels contrived.

Listen to Episode 1 now:

What do you hope listeners new to curling will take away from this story? And what do you hope curling lovers will gain? 

One thing we told the curlers involved in this project all along was that this story wasn't a "gotcha" piece. We weren't trying to propagate rumours, we didn't want anyone to feel like they were sacrificing personal relationships to tell this story, and ultimately, we settled on telling everyone involved that even though this is about a scandal, this is a love letter to curling. And I think it did turn out that way. If you know nothing about curling, I hope you'll take away that this is a very unique sport with a community aspect to it that all curlers cherish and I don't believe exists anywhere else, and that there's some really interesting characters involved in this world you may not have known about that you should. I think curling is the best sport in the world, and I want people to share that feeling with me, and with our community.

For the curling lover, I hope it gives you some insight into this incident and these people that you didn't know before, and I just hope it brings you joy to see curling covered in this manner. It's so rare that our sport gets the type of spotlight that comes with being featured on CBC Podcasts, with a team of about 10 people all working on a curling story and taking two years to put it all together, and I really tried to make something that if I didn't make it and I was just listening to it, I would be so excited and greatly anticipating each new episode. And I hope it strengthens our community too. As I said earlier, there are still some curlers who harbour resentment towards each other about things that happened in that Broomgate season, and if this is something that encourages discussion and heals even one relationship that still hasn't recovered from that time, that would be the best feeling in the world for me.

Answers have been lightly edited and condensed for length.