Kevin Martin
Silvana Tirinzoni
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 Silvana Tirinzoni at #9.
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 Silvana Tirinzoni
Skip of the only women's team to win four consecutive world championships, taking gold in 2019, 2021, 2022 and 2023 with Alina Patz throwing last stones, then adding silvers in 2024 and 2025 when Rachel Homan's Canada finally stopped them. The arrangement itself was unusual and much discussed: Tirinzoni called the game and held the broom while Patz delivered the fourth pair, a split of the skip's role that several elite teams have since copied. She also won European titles in 2023 and 2024 and a long run of Swiss national championships, and finally took an Olympic medal at Milano Cortina 2026, silver after a 6-5 loss to Sweden in the final. She announced her retirement in the summer of 2026, ending the most successful sustained run any women's team has assembled.