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.
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.
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.
