Anette Norberg
Kevin Martin
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Anette Norberg leads 2 of 3 categories. Our all-time ranking places Anette Norberg at #2 and Kevin Martin at #7.
The case for Anette Norberg
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 case for Kevin Martin
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.