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🥌Team Sandra Schmirler

Canada · Caledonian Curling Club, Regina

Major honours

1 (1998)Olympic gold
3World Championship
3Scotties Tournament of Hearts

The face of women's curling's arrival as an Olympic sport. Skipped by Sandra Schmirler with Jan Betker, Joan McCusker and Marcia Gudereit, this Regina team won the Scotties and the world title in the same year three times, in 1993, 1994 and 1997 — three world titles was a record no women's team had managed before. After clearing Canada's Olympic trials in 1997, the team went 6-1 in the round robin at Nagano 1998 and beat Helena Blach Lavrsen's Denmark 7-5 in the final for women's curling's first Olympic gold. Their handling of pressure on the last stone, especially a run of double takeouts produced at the Canadian playoffs, is still used as coaching material today. Schmirler died in March 2000, aged 36, two years after her Olympic win, and the foundation named for her continues to support neonatal intensive care units across Canada.

Record comparison

World Championship wins
3
World Championship medals
3
Olympic gold medals
1
Olympic medals
1
National titles
3

Bars are scaled to the strongest team in this list.

Club legends

Sandra SchmirlerJan BetkerJoan McCuskerMarcia Gudereit

Rivalry

Domestically through the 1990s, this team repeatedly met Colleen Jones' Nova Scotia squad at the Scotties, while internationally Elisabet Gustafson's Sweden was the era's biggest rival, splitting world titles across the same years.

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