Jennifer Jones
Elisabet Gustafson
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Elisabet Gustafson leads 2 of 3 categories. Our all-time ranking places Jennifer Jones at #6 and Elisabet Gustafson at #10.
The case for Jennifer Jones
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.
The case for Elisabet Gustafson
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.