Introducing: Broomgate

Hello everyone, ed here. I'm delighted to share with you as a very special sneak peak, the first episode of another brand new podcast I executive produced. It's called Broomgate. Over the course of six episodes, semi professional curler and fully professional comedian, the amazing John Cullen is exposing the unbelievable, never before told, true story of a scandal that rocked

Content warning. The following podcast contains mentions of brooms and graphic depictions of curling. It's Thursday, September tenth, twenty fifteen, and my phone is blowing up. My friends are all texting me, John, are you seeing what's happening right now? They tell me it's an emergency and I have to turn on the TV.

It is the Enti's Grand Slam of Curling on Sports that and they are fired up for the first event of two thy fifteen twenty sixteen, it's the Tour Challenge in Paradise, duber Lamb and Labrador.

Walking onto the ice is a man named Brad Gujou. Ask most anyone in Canada to name a curler, and whether you're into the Gamer not, they'll have heard of Brad. If Brad isn't the Michael Jordan of curling, he might be the Lebron James, the best curler of this generation and someone who is innovating the sport on and off the ice.

The twelve time New Fland Men's champion, three time Grand Slam champion, two thousand and six Olympic gold medalists from Saint John's nupoun Land.

Seen the texts from my friends who are elite curlers and broadcasters from around the world are telling me that Brad is trying something that no one has ever seen before. They can't figure out what the hell is going on, and once I turn the TV on, neither can I.

I'm sensing there's a favorite in the house. Maybe maybe not.

All curling teams consist of four players. The skip is in charge of the strategy for the team. The team's boss. Brad Gugue is the skip of his team, and like lots of bosses, he does an awful lot of yelling.

Har fr as Brad Gushu was yelling hurry Now they're using a theory. You're trying out a theory of where what sweeper should sweep and on what kind of side of the sliding surface.

What Gugu is doing is he is using just one sweeper, one sweeper this approach. That's what my friends were blowing up my phone about. Curling teams always used two sweepers, but during this game there's only one and we didn't know why.

So they were trying to hold that rock straighter by having one sweeper on the outside sweeping card the other one.

Not.

What I'm seeing is Brad's team mate, Brat Gallant sweeping the rock up the ice and him alone. The other team was looking on in confusion, and so was I sitting at home on the cow which I thought to myself, what possible benefit could this have? It looked really strange. While Brett madly swept in front of the rock as it traveled down the ice. His sweeping partner, who would normally be brushing along with him, was just kind of walking beside the rock doing nothing, like he had just given up.

What do you think it of, Kevin.

Well? I think the inside sweeper certainly shouldn't be on the inside of the.

Curve of the rock.

Twenty ten Olympic gold medalist Kevin Martin was in the broadcast booth that day.

To not have the other person out front cleaning in a frosty situation doesn't make a lot of sense.

I don't think.

But we'll see how it goes as the game progresses.

But it may be a theory that maybe shared that Charlotte.

But Kevin was wrong. Within weeks, every competitive curling team on the planet would switch to using one sweeper. It wasn't because they were lazy, It wasn't because the rocks or the ice changed. It was because of one thing, and one thing only, a.

Broom, a new super broom made of a mysterious material never used before, and that broom, combined with the one sweeper technique, would lead to the biggest scandal in curling history. This is Broomgate, the story of how a broom almost killed curling. When I say the word broomgate, what does that mean to you?

That's when that tight knit fabric amongst the top competitive teams started to be ripped apart.

I think some.

Friendships were ended.

This is a mess, very stressful, a lot of sleepless nights.

It felt super personal because it was being held a.

Cheater when your first went out the door.

Because you're gonna get bloody, people are gonna come.

After you like it was just toxic.

It was so toxic.

Her very stressful, traumatic curling season, my least fun curling season of my entire career.

It was the It was a year I'd like to forget.

While some people might have wanted to forget about broomgate, there was no way not once the controversy hit late night TV.

Folks, this is one sports controversy you can't just sweep under the rug. I bristle left the idea. I try to brush off the allegations all you want, but this sort of thing doesn't happen in a vacuum.

It took just two months for this scandal to move beyond the world of curling. By November of t twenty fifteen, The New York Times, CNN and The Washington Post had picked up on the story. Stephen Colbert did a full six minute segment on it.

The point is, I'm a curling purist. As far as I'm concerned, it's all gone downhill ever since they started playing indoors. I prefer the original sixteenth century Scottish rules. Just a group of guys on a frozen pond, hurling flat bottom river stones and probably falling through the ice.

Whoever doesn't die wins. Now that's a sport.

My name is John Cullen. If you're the kind of curling sicco who knows who finished second at the twenty fifteen British Columbia Curling Championships, well then you might have heard of me. I was what's commonly referred to as a Tier two curler. My team went a handful of World Curling Tour events, a modest amount of cash, and peaked at number thirty in the world. I have seven provincial medals to my name, and none of them are gold.

Curling, like love, is a disease of the mind.

One needs a cardigan, a comfortable cap, rubbers, a broom, and stones stones a broom.

If you're just catching up, Ah yeah, a broom. It's the most important piece of equipment in curling.

Fundamentals of a good curling delivery don't change the position of the head, shoulders, or body, except to elevate them by straightening the knees.

This sweet, very Canadian film from nineteen sixty three shows us one fundamental thing about curling. Very little has changed. Curling is actually considered to be one of the oldest team sports known to man. A stone was found in Scotland with the date fifteen eleven inscribed on it.

Oh sure, keep your foot in the hack, use it to push off.

The basic rules haven't changed in hundreds of years. The key is to have more stones stay in the bull's eye known as the house at the end of the game than your opponents. To do that, every member of the team gets their turn at being the shooter and moving the rock down the ice. But once that rock is let go, it's in the sweeper's hands to make it perfect.

Slide the stone easily. Let the weight of the stone work for you.

Keep your eye on the broom I've got it easy enough.

For most of my career, I was considered a pretty good sweeper, and for nearly a decade, Jay Wakefield was my sweeping partner.

I'm an introverted person, so like having less people to interact with. This is always a better thing.

For me.

To talk to Jay about the ripple effect of the one sweeper technique and our years sweeping together.

I've always just played with my best friends. I've never I've only had a handful of teams where, you know, maybe me and another guy on the team didn't really get along.

But to be clear, I wasn't one of the guys you didn't like.

You were not.

No, It's hard to go ten years playing with the same guy if you don't like you don't like them.

This is very true, and it's especially true when it comes to me and Jay.

So obviously not just that you spend a lot of time together, but you spend a lot of time on the ice together. You spend every shot in each other's face, talking to each other. It is just a lot of constant communication.

My wife once told Jay that when she watches us sweep together, it looks like we're kissing. Maybe subconsciously we wanted to who knows, but what do you remember or about the switch to one sweeper.

I remember I was out doing something I can't remember what, and my phone started to blow up with all my curling friends being like you watching this. So I got home and I looked, and I'm like, what the hell's going on here? And it was all this kind of chaos. For lack of a better word, we had absolutely no idea really what the one sweeper thing was all about, and like how to actually try to make it do what they were doing.

It took us a while to catch up, but like every other competitive team at the time, we made the switch.

Do you think.

Curling like lost something a little bit when all of a sudden, only one guy's now sweeping at a time. Was some of that art kind of lost?

Yeah? I think I did. I think at the time, being a competitive sweeper, I felt like my job was less sacred. I guess like some of the art was gone and some of the skill was gone because all of a sudden I could just like do whatever with the broom and make the shot right.

I feel that way too. It wasn't like the one sweeper method took away all the skill I had developed over two decades. Jay and I were still a team within a team, but sweeping had become less of a sacred bond between two teammates. And as I make my way through this story, I do feel a sense of loss. I think a lot of us did. But it wasn't just the one sweeper technique that made us feel like something had shifted. The reason we were all sweeping differently

Who's the older brother.

Archie, I'm the little I'm ten years younger. Even though I look ten years older, I'm ten years younger. That's what happens when you work with them, you know.

My producer Kathleen goldhar and I meet Archie and haratchman Avian at the headquarters of Hardline, one of the world's largest curling broom manufacturers. It's tucked away in a suburb of Montreal, not far from the airport. Hardline's office belies status is one of curling's big dogs. It's in a one story building in the corner of an industrial park. This is decidedly not the Nike World headquarters. Archie and Harratch sit together behind one desk. It's cluttered with invoices,

I don't know if i'd call myself a bully, but this is Archie. Let's just say he grew up and not taking my shit.

He was a very good older brother.

He showed me life, you know, showed me the ropes, and he was always there, always had my back in a lot of ways. And you know, I'm very grateful to have an older brother like that. He basically, you know, took care of me. I mean, we both lost our dads when I was really young, so he was the guy that made sure that I was on the right path.

Her ats was sixteen, Archie twenty six when their dad died in a car accident while on vacation in Armenia.

It was sixteen.

I remember I was in secondary four, which is what tenth grade. I had final exams two weeks later after that, and my brother was young too, so he was twenty six and he had to go there and you know, bring him back. Our mother was in the same car accident, so we had to take care of her too at the same time. So we grew up pretty fast.

It's life.

It happens, aren't professional curlers, right? How did you find your way to hardline.

Only in our heads.

We're professional.

We're professional armchair curlers, basically is what we are. Friend of mine that I played ball with begged me for ten years to go try it out. And I used to tell him, you know, come on, man, it's for old people. And I used to brush him off all the time. In this one year I caved. I said, you know what, just to shut you up, I'm going to go in there and I'm going to try it and then leave me alone. He said, no problem, and I walked in the door, fell in love with the game, and the rest is history.

But before he discovered curling, Archie's life was all over the place.

I was on the path to become a ski bumb Actually I was living in a Whistler and just enjoying life. And came back and my father used to own a small business and worked with him for a bit and didn't like that. Then I went to work for a friend of mine at a food company and really like that too much.

And I'm the kind of guy that needs to be outside. I can't be indoors.

So Archie found a job that took him outside.

I was a what do you call it, a an information distribution engineer, what does that mean.

I was a mailman.

He was a mailman for the Postal Service, and I loved my job. It was a great job. It was starting to wear on me, but it was never a fact of I have to find something else.

Their mother wasn't too excited about the way Archie's life was going, and so she put pressure on her hatch to make something of himself.

She put her foot down with her hatch and made him hit the books.

And he actually made something of himself by getting an MBA, going to work on Wall Street for fifteen years, and he took on the big boys in.

One so before Hardline was born, Archie the Mailman was just a local curler who loved to hang with his buddies after work and play a few games, then shoot the shit over a beer, and her hatch was working on Wall Street. The inspiration for Hardline came to Archie in two thousand and nine when he was at a bond Spiel, a fancy name for a curling tournament in Charlotte Walquebec.

There's a bond Spiel that everyone should attend once in their lifetime, about an hour and a half outside Quebec city.

At the bond Spiel, a curling legend named Randy Ferbey and his team caught Archie's eye.

They had these custom rooms, and our eyes were popping out of our heads. We got the brilliant idea of coming out with custom rooms at the time, and we were on a high all weekend.

And Archie would return home from Charlevois just buzzing, which is funny because the broom he's talking about doesn't have anything to do with performance, but rather just a custom paint job done on an eg existing broom. And he wasn't even imagining starting a custom curling broom empire. He was just excited about the idea of making a bunch of brooms for his team. But he very quickly hit a snag.

The ebrush artist told me it was going to be roughly one hundred dollars.

Of broom, so that would be too expensive.

It was on a bit of a downer for a week or two and I met a friend of mine and he says, ah, you know, you look a little bit down. And I told him the entire story, and he said, well, what are these booms made of? And I said, well, a carbon fiber And he tells me he's got a friend of the carbon fiber business.

You know, why don't you give him a call.

The good news was that this guy could make the brooms for cheaper. The bad news was that he'd have to make a bulk order. So he called one of his curling buddies, Stan Pong with a proposal.

Listen, we should really try this out. You know, we'll make a few hundred brooms and if they sell, they sell, and if they don't, well, it is what it is. And so we basically got I think at that time it was seven guys to pitch and five hundred dollars, and uh hardline was born.

Archie had unintentionally launched a curling broom company, but so far all he had were broom handles. A broom is nothing without its head. When it comes to curling, the head is crazy important. It's what helps to control the rock as it travels down the ice. Sweeping reduces the friction between the rock and the ice, allowing it to

At that time, we were getting handed lots of heads to try out, saying, man, it was the best head on the market, and I had told them that, you know what, I'm gonna try give it a and give you a review on it. And basically they weren't really that good.

Archie kept turning down broomheads presented to him. That's until he met with a mysterious inventor who showed Archie something a little bit different.

The ice pad was basically put into my hands and they said, like, you got to try this, So I tried it. The ease of sweeping of the ice pad and the fact that the fabric you could clean it, whereas the other pads on the market once they got dirty you have to change them because they're useless. I said, this is going to be like really really good. And I said, well, listen, if you were to give me

Archie named his new head the ice pad, A new broomhead made of an unidentified fabric by an unidentified inventor.

Who handed you the ice pad?

Well, the inventor? Who's that the inventor?

Why won't you tell us that is?

No? I think it's not.

I don't understand why we want to keep his name secret.

Well, why do you want to know the name, because.

He invented this great thing. I want to talk to him about what he invented and what do you did?

Well, you can look it up.

We did look it up. We couldn't find the inventor. As you might imagine, information on inventors who specialize in finding the best possible fabric for a curling broom is not so readily available. But what we do know is that this broom material is incredibly versatile, strong, and water proof. It makes sweeping feel easy, a little too easy, so

All you got to do is put the broom in front of the rock, and the rock starts going whatever direction you want. Brad Guju, if everybody can't figure it out, they're idiots. But we're not going to tell everybody, but we're gonna show you. We're going to show you the impact that these could have.

The broom could take the rock in quote whatever direction you want. And Hardline sponsored players had been using the broom for a couple of years now, and the curling community started to wonder was it giving them an unfair advantage.

The problem is there's a whole lack of trust now among the players. There was a great camaraderie among the players out here on the tour, and there's a it's a big divisor now and that's kind of sad for the sport to be.

Frank Quickly, suspicions around this broom started to tear at the very fabric of my community. You know the problem between the teams that you know, guys that were friends, uh recently, they're not talking.

To each other.

Is this sport becoming cutthroat? Is money changing this sport? But here's the thing, there's something I haven't told you. Years before, Brad showed the world what this broom could do. I was one of the first curlers to use a Hardline broom and I loved it. I told all my curling friends about it. And so when Hardline wanted some star power, I convinced one of my friends, who just so happened to be one of the best curlers in the world, to use the broom And little did I

The thought crossed our mind where they were aware of this and they hit it.

This type of technology is going to ruin the sport.

So hard to deal with that because we wanted the technology race to stop.

It was awful.

It was so unpleasant to be at trailing events, which is usually I just said, it's my favorite part of the game.

He goes, this is these brooms, this is what we're dealing with.

You can manipulate this rock that gets on a Joystad. We feel like we're bringing a knife to a gunfight.

And that's when I said, these guys want a war, I'm gonna give them a war.

They're never gonna forget.

Broogate is a production of USG Audio and CBC in association with Pacific Electric and Kelly and Kelly. Hosted by me John Cullen and concept devised by John Cullen and Kelly and Kelly. Showrunner is Kathleen goldhar Executive producers are Josh Block from USG Audio, Mike Falbo, Ed Helms and Brett Harris from Pacific Electric, Chris Kelly, Lauren Berkovich and Pat Kelly from Kelly and Kelly, Chris Oak and Cecil Fernandez from CBC and John Cullen. Assistant editor is Max Collins.