Curling's only scandal: How 'Broomgate' changed the game forever

Curling is a sport marked more by its politeness than its competitiveness, but in 2015, a seemingly simple change to a piece of equipment set off an uproar that still cuts deep for many in the sport.

It was called Broomgate, and as a competitive curler, I found myself in the middle of it.

I was one of the first players on the World Curling Tour to use a Hardline broom, and I thought I knew just about everything there was to know about the story: A new broom company emerges on the scene and club curlers really like their brooms. They praise their lightness and the speed at which they can move the broom head, as it's made out of a material that reduces friction between the broom head and the ice. 

Competitive curlers like me start to use it. We really like it. It holds the rock straighter than ever before. It makes the rocks go further than we thought possible.

Elite curlers start to use it. Mike McEwen, who skipped one of the top teams in the world, has pretty much the best curling tour season we've ever seen.

Brad Gushue wonders what might happen if he tries a new sweeping technique with it: only using one sweeper instead of two. It turns out that with that technique, we can do anything. We can make the rocks curl. We can make them stay so straight it looks like they're backing up. Chaos ensues.

It's really curling's only scandal. There have been other blips on the radar, but this was the main thing. Broken friendships, intense rivalries, rumours of lawsuits between broom manufacturers and the sport's governing bodies, and it all led to, in the words of four-time world champion and 40-year curling veteran Glenn Howard, "the worst curling season of my entire career."

The strange part is, considering it is one of the most controversial things that ever happened in the sport, no one has ever really talked about it. An interview here, a soundbite there. But we've never gotten the full story. 

So I set out to find that full story in Broomgate: A Curling Scandal.

It's a six-part series that covers everything from the invention of the broom, to the in-fighting, to the eventual solution that was hammered out over a few stressful days in the tiny town of Kemptville, Ont. It's available now wherever you get your podcasts.

Going into making the series, I felt that my goal was to tell the story I had already heard, and one told to me countless times, from players, rulemakers, broom manufacturers, and anyone else who knew I was lending my ear to listen. I expected it to follow a certain path, but it turns out that there was still a lot I had to learn about Broomgate once I started truly digging into the story.

A question I got asked a lot in the lead-up to and aftermath of the podcast's release was "why now?"

Most of the controversy occurred over a single season, from the fall of 2015 to the spring of 2016. I thought nine years was just about the perfect amount of time because it felt like a lot of the wounds were healed and people would be ready to talk about it. Also, it was recent enough that curlers would not have forgotten what happened.

I was right about the second part. Perhaps too right. A lot of curlers have not forgotten what happened, and it has led them to still not want to talk about it. No one died. No one is in any sort of danger for sharing their story. And yet, quite a few curlers still told me no. Some told me no after telling me yes, that taking some time to think about it and what they might say gave them enough pause to cancel their interview with me.