Kevin Martin
Ernie Richardson
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Ernie Richardson leads 1 of 2 categories. Our all-time ranking places Kevin Martin at #7 and Ernie Richardson at #8.
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 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.