Curling Canada, tired of your mockery, sweeps aside the goofy image it once encouraged

The guardians of curling in this country have a request to make of Canadians: Please stop laughing at their sport.

Curling knows that it mainly has itself to blame. It’s heard the jokes: all those calls to “Hurry hard!” and “Sweep!” shouted at curlers as they walk down the street. For as long as anyone can remember, the sport has leaned into that and flaunted its reputation as a quirky pastime favoured by kitsch-loving fans, encouraging the mockery like a chubby kid who becomes the class clown as a pre-emptive defence against the ridicule of others.

In the past decade alone, marketing campaigns mounted by Curling Canada deployed a time-travelling, kilt-wearing Scotsman with a heavy accent and a fiery enthusiasm named Angus McStone; an oblivious sports TV anchor named Doug who does inept play-by-play and refers to a curling stone as a “giant puck-thing”; a woman in a flower shop goaded to vigorous sweeping by an excitable passerby; and a two-minute animated introduction to the sport for prospective fans that describes curling as “the game with the ice, and the rocks, and the sweeping, and the yelling.”

But, lately, all of that joking around was starting to wear on the athletes. More to the point, they and Curling Canada executives believed it was undermining the sport’s decades-long efforts to be regarded as a serious athletic pursuit. “Curlers have a bit of an inferiority complex,” said Nolan Thiessen, a three-time winner of the Brier and former world champion who became CEO of Curling Canada in January after serving as the organization’s executive director of marketing and fan experience. “People don’t consider them athletes.”

The campaigns weren’t helping.

“Anybody in the curling world, when they get the call to be in a commercial, they know they’re going to be teased because of the tone,” said Brad Gushue, an Olympic and world champion who is vying for his sixth Brier win this weekend. His eldest daughter panned most of the ads for her dad’s sport as “cringey.” She’s a 16-year-old girl, so she would know.

Which is why, when four-time national champion Kerri Einarson got a call from Curling Canada last summer asking if she would like to be one of two curlers, with Gushue, featured in a new ad campaign, she hesitated. “I didn’t always fully agree with the previous ads,” she offered diplomatically, in an interview. “I think even the athletes that were doing them didn’t agree with them.”

Now, during its annual Season of Champions series of competitions, Curling Canada is rolling out a marketing effort that departs radically from its hokey history. Inspired by other pro sports’ veneration of their athletes, the campaign’s centrepiece is a pair of cinematic TV spots – one each focused on Einarson and Gushue – that feel like a Nike / Adidas / Under Armour mood board: all quick cutting, dim lighting, ominous soundtrack, moody internal monologues, extreme close-ups, and the roar of an unseen crowd.

Each spot focuses intently on Einarson or Gushue imagining themselves taking a final shot in a competition. As they do, we flash back to their early morning wake-ups, the endless solitary hours spent training at the gym and the rink, the personal sacrifices each athlete has made to get to this point.

“It all comes down to this rock,” says Einarson, in her voiceover, as she pushes off from the hack and drifts forward, and we get a montage of a single rock sliding down a sheet of ice that seems to go on forever. She declares, with grim determination, that she will silence “all those voices trying to tear me down.” And then the kicker, as Einarson’s face fills the screen. “We’ve given everything we have, for a chance to get everything we want.”

Gushue’s voiceover focuses on the shot itself. “All the gold medals in the world can’t help you now,” he tells himself. “You leave it all out there on the ice, to leave behind a legacy.”

Both spots conclude with the campaign’s tagline superimposed atop the athlete’s face: “A Stone’s Throw From History.”

“People don’t often think about curling in the way they think about other sports, in terms of the turmoil that goes through your mind as an athlete,” said Michael Pal, an associate creative director with Curling Canada’s ad agency Cossette, and the copywriter for the campaign. “It’s the same thing as Michael Jordan at the free-throw line, or going up against a goalie at the end of a hockey game. These are big, epic sports moments that I think we had overlooked in some of the previous work.

“We wanted to position it like a Nike, or any ad you would see with LeBron James, giving these athletes the reverence they deserve. You can’t just step up off the couch and become a world-champion curler.”

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It may not be a coincidence that the pivot to treating curlers like serious athletes is unfolding under the direction of its first CEO to be a former world champion. “These events – the Scotties and the Briers and the world championships that we host every year, it’s somebody’s dream to win. And these athletes are putting in so much work. We want to showcase what this means to them, and what it means to our sport,” Thiessen said in an interview.

“I absolutely understand that curling is sometimes considered a niche sport. It’s a piece of Canadiana.” Still, he said, “I don’t want people to laugh at us.”

As with many sports that have a reputation of being favoured by an older demographic, curling feels the need to hurry hard to attract younger fans. “What do those fans look for in sport? They don’t look for ‘quirky,’” Thiessen said. “If someone’s going to spend their money on a ticket and come to an event, they want to feel like it means something.”

Some sports have been more successful than others in courting the next generation, in part by focusing on the individual personalities who play the game. “We’ve seen the success with the NBA, going back to the late eighties, early nineties, when they shifted their focus to the athletes,” Gushue said. “And now, we see with Formula One, Drive to Survive, focusing on the drivers. Those are the people that viewers really want to be able to connect with.”

It’s hard to know yet whether the new curling campaign is attracting younger audiences, but Gushue noted that, when his spot came out, he showed it to his daughter. “She’s brutally honest, and she was, like, ‘Dad, that’s pretty cool. I really like it.’ And I was, like – Okay, that’s kind of the approval I was looking for.”