Sandra Schmirler
Eve Muirhead
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 Sandra Schmirler at #3 and Eve Muirhead at #11.
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The case for Sandra Schmirler
The most influential women's skip the sport has produced, and the reason curling had a face when it entered the Olympic programme. Schmirler's Regina rink of Jan Betker, Joan McCusker and Marcia Gudereit won the Canadian championship and then the world title in 1993, 1994 and 1997, a treble no other women's team had managed, and in 1998 she skipped Canada to the first Olympic women's gold at Nagano, finishing 8-1 and beating Denmark in the final. Her shot-making under pressure, particularly a series of last-stone doubles in Canadian playoffs, is still used as coaching footage. She died of cancer in March 2000, aged 36, less than two years after the Olympic title. The foundation established in her name has since raised millions for neonatal intensive care units across Canada, and the Sandra Schmirler Foundation broadcast remains a fixture of the Canadian curling calendar.
The case for Eve Muirhead
The most successful British curler of the modern era and the one who converted Rhona Martin's 2002 moment into a sustained programme. Muirhead won four world junior titles before she was 21, took the world championship in 2013, and won three European titles, the first at 19, which made her the youngest skip to do so. Her Olympic career was a long argument with near-misses: bronze at Sochi 2014, a fourth place at PyeongChang 2018 decided by a missed last stone, and finally gold at Beijing 2022, when Great Britain beat Japan 10-3 in the final for the country's only gold of those Games. She added the world mixed doubles title the same year with Bobby Lammie, then retired in August 2022 at 32 with eight Scottish championships to her name.