Kevin Martin
Elisabet Gustafson
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Dead even across the measured categories. Our all-time ranking places Kevin Martin at #7 and Elisabet Gustafson at #10.
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.
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.