Broomgate: A Curling Scandal

Personal Best is a podcast that celebrates small ambitions, half-wins and the quiet satisfaction of getting less bad at things. Each week they help ordinary people work through the little things they’d never bring to a life coach — like having the courage to dine alone at a fancy restaurant or getting less awkward at handshakes. Let them be your self-improvement sidekicks! More episodes from the brand new season of Personal Best are available at: https://link.chtbl.com/m4jFAEUo

From the Executive Producers of Broomgate comes SNAFU, a show about history’s greatest screw-ups, hosted by actor, writer, and comedian Ed Helms. Today we’re excited to share the first episode of Season 2: MEDBURG. In 1971, a courageous group of activists broke into an FBI office and stole files containing J. Edgar Hoover's deepest, darkest secrets. How did their actions forever upend everything Americans knew about their country's most powerful law enforcement agency? Keep listening and then search SNAFU in your favourite podcast app: https://bit.ly/SNAFUMEDBURG

Host John Cullen has a heart-to-heart with producer Kathleen Goldhar about curling, Broomgate, and all the bonus stories they left on the cutting room floor.  

For as long as curling has been a game there was nothing in the rulebook about brooms, and so players had nowhere to turn when Broomgate hit. Tensions kept growing, and there were near blow ups and confrontations on-ice. What’s a World Curling Federation to do? Create a sweeping summit — and decide the future of the sport forever.

Another company, BalancePlus, decides to get into the broom modification game to challenge the Hardline broom. It all comes to a messy confrontation when teams go head to head at a 2015 bonspiel. The ice ends up shredded — and an emergency meeting is convened in Toronto to decide what to do.

Some people say Brad Gushue, Olympic gold medalist and world title holder, plays the sport of curling with the strategy and cunning of a chess grandmaster. So when he starts losing to two particular teams, he takes a closer look at why and he zeroes in on their brooms.

It’s 2015 and we’re at the international Grand Slam of Curling, hosted in Paradise, Newfoundland. A team led by home crowd favourite Brad Gushue debuts a new and strikingly effective new technique. Instead of sweeping the way curlers always have with two brooms, they’re using only one. Within weeks, every competitive curling team on the planet would switch to this technique and the special broom that enabled it. It was the start of the biggest scandal in curling history.

Flush with an infusion of cash from investors the brothers behind the Hardline Curling company are ready to take their revolutionary curling broom into the world. Now all they need is to convince a bonafide superstar to use it. Enter Winnipeg’s Mike McEwen.

A six-part series that tells the never-before-told story of how a broom almost killed curling. Featuring interviews with some of the biggest names in curling — and the men behind the infamous broom. Releasing May 6, 2024.