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