🥌GOAT Rankings

The first curler of either sex to win two Olympic gold medals as a skip, taking Turin 2006 and then defending in Vancouver 2010, a feat no man matched until Brad Jacobs in 2026. Her career is remarkable for its length as much as its peaks: she won a silver at the 1988 Calgary demonstration event and was still winning world gold in 2011, twenty-three years later. That 2011 title in Esbjerg came after her Olympic double and gave her three world championships in total, alongside two silvers and four bronzes, plus seven European titles between 1988 and 2007. She competed at fifteen European Championships. In Sweden she is the figure who made curling a mainstream televised sport, and the pipeline that produced Anna Hasselborg and the current generation runs directly back through her.

The most influential women's skip the sport has produced, and the reason curling had a face when it entered the Olympic programme. Schmirler's Regina rink of Jan Betker, Joan McCusker and Marcia Gudereit won the Canadian championship and then the world title in 1993, 1994 and 1997, a treble no other women's team had managed, and in 1998 she skipped Canada to the first Olympic women's gold at Nagano, finishing 8-1 and beating Denmark in the final. Her shot-making under pressure, particularly a series of last-stone doubles in Canadian playoffs, is still used as coaching footage. She died of cancer in March 2000, aged 36, less than two years after the Olympic title. The foundation established in her name has since raised millions for neonatal intensive care units across Canada, and the Sandra Schmirler Foundation broadcast remains a fixture of the Canadian curling calendar.

The dominant women's skip of the 2020s and the most prolific winner in the professional era of the sport. Homan won the world championship in 2017 with an undefeated run, then took back-to-back titles in 2024 and 2025, making her Canadian rink the first to defend the women's world crown since Schmirler in 1993-94. Domestically she has five Scotties Tournament of Hearts titles, and her 2023-24 season produced a 67-7 overall record widely described as the best any women's team has posted. She won 22 consecutive Scotties games across 2024 and 2025 and shot a perfect 100 percent in the 2025 final. Her 20 Grand Slam titles are the most by any woman. The one gap closed only partly at Milano Cortina 2026, where she took bronze at her third Olympics after finishing sixth in 2018.

Six world women's championships, more than any other Canadian or European skip has managed, and won with four different teams, which is the detail that separates her from every other multiple champion. Patz was the alternate on Mirjam Ott's winning Swiss rink in 2012, skipped her own team to gold in 2015 at 25, and then threw last stones for Silvana Tirinzoni's team through four consecutive titles from 2019 to 2023, adding silvers in 2024 and 2025. She also won the world mixed doubles title in 2011. Her hitting accuracy is the technical hallmark, but the four-peat was built on draws into congested houses under the five-rock rule. Three Olympic appearances brought two fourth places before she finally reached the podium with silver at Milano Cortina 2026, and she returns to skipping her own team afterwards.

The most durable competitor in the modern women's game and the only skip to go through an Olympic curling tournament unbeaten in the women's event, finishing 11-0 at Sochi 2014. Jones won six Scotties Tournament of Hearts titles between 2005 and 2018, tying Colleen Jones's record, and world championships in 2008 and 2018, ten years apart. Her single most replayed shot came at the 2005 Scotties, where she hit an opposition stone outside the house and rolled to the button for four to win the final with the last stone of the game, a shot the broadcast analyst called the best he had ever seen. She reached eighteen Scotties in all before retiring from four-player curling after the 2024 season, then continued competing in mixed doubles with her husband Brent Laing.

For twenty years the standard against which Canadian men's teams measured themselves, and the skip who best exploited the professional circuit that emerged in the 2000s. Martin won Olympic gold at Vancouver 2010 with a flawless tournament, 9-0 through the round robin and 11-0 overall, the first side to sweep an Olympic curling event since Great Britain in 1924, having taken silver at Salt Lake City in 2002. He added the world championship in 2008 and four Brier titles across three decades, in 1991, 1997, 2008 and 2009, going 11-0 and 13-0 in the last two. His fifteen Grand Slam titles and two Olympic trials wins reflect a career built as much on tour earnings as on national championships, and his teams' relentless takeout game defined Canadian men's curling before the five-rock rule arrived.

The first international dynasty and the team that set the technical template for everyone who followed. Richardson skipped a rink of his brother Garnet and cousins Arnold and Wes from Regina to four Briers and four Scotch Cup world championships in 1959, 1960, 1962 and 1963, a period in which the international championship was effectively a Canadian export. Their 1959 Brier win made them the youngest team to take the title at that time. What made them historically important was method rather than results: the sliding delivery, the willingness to play takeouts as a matter of course rather than as a last resort, and a level of practised consistency that European teams did not yet have. Richardson wrote several instruction books that carried that method abroad, and was appointed to the Order of Canada in 1978.

Skip of the only women's team to win four consecutive world championships, taking gold in 2019, 2021, 2022 and 2023 with Alina Patz throwing last stones, then adding silvers in 2024 and 2025 when Rachel Homan's Canada finally stopped them. The arrangement itself was unusual and much discussed: Tirinzoni called the game and held the broom while Patz delivered the fourth pair, a split of the skip's role that several elite teams have since copied. She also won European titles in 2023 and 2024 and a long run of Swiss national championships, and finally took an Olympic medal at Milano Cortina 2026, silver after a 6-5 loss to Sweden in the final. She announced her retirement in the summer of 2026, ending the most successful sustained run any women's team has assembled.

For two decades the benchmark for a women's career, with four world championships in 1992, 1995, 1998 and 1999, a total not beaten until the Swiss teams of the 2020s. Gustafson added two world bronzes and four European titles, and skipped Sweden to bronze at Nagano 1998, the first Olympic curling tournament with full medal status, finishing sixth at Salt Lake City in 2002. Her teams were built on a European style of aggressive draw play that ran counter to the takeout-heavy Canadian orthodoxy of the era, and they proved that a nation with a few thousand curlers could beat one with hundreds of thousands. She did all of it while training and working as a surgeon, and was inducted into the World Curling Federation Hall of Fame in 2012.

The most successful British curler of the modern era and the one who converted Rhona Martin's 2002 moment into a sustained programme. Muirhead won four world junior titles before she was 21, took the world championship in 2013, and won three European titles, the first at 19, which made her the youngest skip to do so. Her Olympic career was a long argument with near-misses: bronze at Sochi 2014, a fourth place at PyeongChang 2018 decided by a missed last stone, and finally gold at Beijing 2022, when Great Britain beat Japan 10-3 in the final for the country's only gold of those Games. She added the world mixed doubles title the same year with Bobby Lammie, then retired in August 2022 at 32 with eight Scottish championships to her name.

The second woman after Anette Norberg to win two Olympic gold medals as a skip, taking PyeongChang 2018 and then Milano Cortina 2026 with a 6-5 win over Switzerland, and adding bronze in Beijing 2022 for three Olympic medals in total. That Olympic record is the strongest in the current women's game, and it sits oddly alongside a world championship record of two silvers and no gold, which is the main argument used against her. She has three European titles, six Swedish championships and eight Grand Slam wins, and in 2022 her team became the first women's rink to complete a career Grand Slam by winning all four majors. Her calm, low-risk endgame management is the most studied aspect of her play, particularly her willingness to take a single when the alternative carries steal risk.