Jennifer Jones
Ernie Richardson
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Ernie Richardson leads 2 of 3 categories. Our all-time ranking places Jennifer Jones at #6 and Ernie Richardson at #8.
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 Ernie Richardson
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.