Silvana Tirinzoni
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 Silvana Tirinzoni at #9 and Elisabet Gustafson at #10.
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.
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.