Winter Olympics 2026: Four men, one aim – to end 102-year wait for curling gold

It’s a Thursday night in November. A pub in Glasgow’s Merchant City. Four men, all about the age of 30, are squeezed around a small table, eating and talking about what the next few months might bring. Nobody recognises them.

That same pub three months later. Screens showing a Celtic game are changed so the patrons can watch the curling. Almost everyone is anxiously staring at the TVs, willing those same four men to reach a Winter Olympic final.

Chances are they will be doing the same on Saturday (18:05 GMT), when Team GB’s Bruce Mouat, Grant Hardie, Hammy McMillan and Bobby Lammie take on Canada with a gold medal at stake.

«Our gold medal,» as Mouat referred to it after the epic semi-final win over Switzerland in northern Italy on Thursday – a contest which drew 3.4million viewers to the BBC at its peak.

And fulfilling what they believe to be their destiny – by upgrading their silver medal from Beijing four years ago – is what these four Scots have travelled to Cortina to do.

Since that 2022 near miss, Team Mouat have come to dominate men’s curling, winning two World Championships and adding another couple of European crowns, as well as a record 12 Grand Slam titles.

At times, they have been unbeatable.

That cloak of invincibility slipped during the round-robin stages here – leaving qualification out of their hands – but that fright has now been forgotten, replaced with the return of a clear-eyed focus on the task in hand.

But who are these four young men who have now caught the country’s attention? And what makes them more than the sum of their parts?

To understand the dynamic between the quartet, you have to go back almost nine years to when they first came together as a team.

With the world of curling being as small as it is, they weren’t strangers to each other. Hardie and McMillan are 33-year-old cousins from south-west Scotland. Lammie, 29, hails from there, too, and played in a rink previously with 31-year-old Mouat, who knew the others from their shared school days in Edinburgh.

Approaches were made, conversations had, culminating in a meeting.

«That first time we met, the thing we wrote at the top of our list of goals was to win Olympic gold,» Mouat told BBC Sport.

After that, the die was cast. The boys told British Curling they were only willing to join the elite programme as a unit and not individually. Their ultimatum was accepted, success has followed, and now they are considered the best in the world.

Mouat is thought to be among the greatest skips to have played the game. Hardie has a reputation as a high-grade tactician and shot maker, while McMillan and Lammie are credited with reinventing the role of a sweeper.

Once just ‘the lads with the brushes’, their physicality has evolved the position to the extent that the curling cognoscenti consider it to now be «a sweeping game» rather than a throwing one.

But it is the coalescence of their personalities that amplifies all that sporting talent. And underpinning the team are two key things – total honesty and trust.

McMillan says if one of them is being an idiot «the rest can say so», while the more-measured Mouat describes it as «knowing the different things to say to get the best out of each other».

Individually, they are all very different.

McMillan is lively enough for all four of them; Hardie is the logic guy, an engineer by trade; Mouat is thoughtful, reflective and calm – while Lammie is the quiet, reliable presence in the background.

It might be labelled as ‘Team Mouat’ – as per the convention of naming a rink after the skip – but this is very much a collective. In fact, Mouat is keen to share the spotlight.

«Bruce is so compassionate and calm and he’s very different from a lot of skips,» explains BBC Sport pundit and 2022 gold medallist Vicky Wright.

«A lot of them are clearly the leader but the GB team operates so well because they function on a level playing field.

«The dynamic they’ve got works so well because they all bring a different aspect to the table and they all respect that. That’s a massive part of why they’re so successful.»

It’s instructive to see how comfortable the four of them are in each other’s company and with the position they find themselves in.

All four – and alternate Kyle Waddell – have been right in among it in Cortina this week, be it stopping for a chat in the street or in restaurants, meeting friends and relatives, watching other British athletes compete. Or – in Mouat’s case – going pillowcase shopping and «spending far too much money» on the morning of the semi-final.

Even in the moments before that crucial match, there was a relaxed focus about them. McMillan and Hardie were sharing a laugh, Mouat picking out familiar faces in the crowd for a smile and a wave, and Lammie was casually studying the Swiss warming up.

All of that will culminate on Saturday night in the quirky Cortina Curling Stadium, first built as an open-air venue to host the 1956 Games.

In a place where history looks down from the wooden bleachers, these four will attempt to make their own by becoming the first GB men’s rink in 102 years to win Olympic gold.

Achieve that, and maybe the next time they go into that Glasgow pub they might just draw a few glances of recognition.