By John Cullen
If you are the type of person who likes to follow the insider news or the gossip around curling, it’s very possible that at some point over the last year, you might have heard that Grant Hardie was strongly considering retirement at the conclusion of this quadrennial.
After hearing Bruce Mouat suggest on the Broom Brothers podcast last summer that he was pretty sure Hammy McMillan and Bobby Lammie would go another quad but was less sure about Hardie, you might have been more convinced. Watching Hardie get so emotional in the wake of losing the gold medal game at the Winter Olympics made it easy to think that those tears weren’t just about the loss of that game, but that he was mourning the fact his curling career may be over.
It turns out those reports were greatly exaggerated. He’s coming back, and he plans to go another quadrennial. But this quadrennial, he plans to do it by carving a different path, and it’s one that doesn’t include being a member of Team Mouat.
After a nine-year run that’ll stand as one of the best in curling history — two Olympic silver medals, two world championships, four European championships, 12 Grand Slam of Curling titles, and several years ranked as the No. 1 team in the world — Hardie is moving on, deciding that what he needed most was a new challenge.
That challenge? Returning to the tee-head and skipping the brand-new Team Hardie with himself at skip and throwing third, Ross Whyte throwing fourth, Craig Waddell throwing second and Euan Kyle rounding out the lineup at lead.
Given all the smoke around his possible retirement, Hardie admitted to me on the latest Broom Brothers podcast that the rumours were real, and he was very strongly considering leaving the sport for good. But there’s one thing that brought him back.
“Having not won that Olympic gold medal, can you settle and admit you’ll never get that? Ultimately, I probably wasn’t prepared to give it up yet. Once you’re invested in the journey of this sport, it’s very hard to give up,” Hardie said.
The goal for most competitive curlers is to stand atop the Olympic podium, and Hardie has come closer than most. The problem with the Olympics is that it’s only every four years, and there are three years of hard work that have to come before it to find yourself there. Hardie admitted it would have been easy to just run it back with Team Mouat and give it another go, but he worried about his motivation for those three intervening years if things stayed the same.
“I think I knew that if I was going to keep curling, I was going to be looking for a new challenge to stimulate myself,” Hardie explained about the decision to leave Team Mouat. “Everyone’s telling you off the back of that Olympic medal, 'The four of you have to go again, the four of you have to get back there and you know, third time lucky.’ It would have been easy to sit back and say, ‘Yep, they’re right,' but if I were to settle into the same routine, I don’t know if I’d have that drive.
"With this new team and skipping, it’s a new challenge, it’s different roles, it helps keep the fire lit for myself.”
While Hardie said Mouat and the rest of his teammates could level with the fact Hardie may not have been his best self if he kept going with them, that doesn’t mean that the change was easy, especially not for Hardie. Anyone who has curled competitively for any length of time will tell you that the toughest part of the sport is the decisions you personally have to make about lineup changes, and given the success of Team Mouat, these conversations were more difficult than most. It also doesn’t make it any easier that McMillan was not just Hardie's teammate for these past nine years, but is also his cousin.
He proposed the idea to Whyte and British Curling about potentially bringing McMillan along with him, but Whyte’s relationship with his current lead Kyle and Kyle’s emergence as one of the game’s top leads — he was first among all leads at Grand Slam events this past season in shooting percentage and is one of the game’s strongest sweepers — eliminated that as an option.
That led to Hardie having to make a very uncomfortable phone call with McMillan, whom Hardie called first once he cemented his decision to leave. The phone call took place a few weeks ago, but currently lives at the forefront of Hardie’s mind.
“I still struggle with it, to be honest,” Hardie said with some weight in his voice. “It’s been very difficult. I think [Hammy] understood my reasoning, but I’m sure it’s not easy for him, it’s not easy for me, and it’ll be strange playing [against] each other again. When I got off the phone, I gave myself a good four or five hours questioning whether I’ve made the right call.”
After phone calls to Mouat and Lammie confirming his decision with them, the move was official, and Hardie was moving on. Leaving Mouat and their world No. 1 team was a hard off-ice decision, but of course, leaving a team of that ability on the ice is a very bold choice. For Hardie, Whyte’s emergence over the last few seasons as an elite last rock-thrower made the decision a little easier.
“He’s a walking highlight reel at times, and I think he has the potential to be the best last rock-thrower in the world,” Hardie gushed. “The challenge for me over the next few years is to help Ross become that, just giving him the platform to continue to make those shots like he has done for the last few years on the Grand Slam circuit, and to help give him more opportunities on the world stage too.”
The choice of leaving the top team in the world and knowing he’ll have to best that same Mouat rink — who now boast Robin Brydone in their ranks, as he moves over from Team Whyte to join Mouat in what is essentially a curling "trade" — to get back to the Winter Olympics gives the decision even more weight. And that’s not to mention Kyle Waddell, who made a Slam final this season and is currently ranked 11th in the world. While that might mean he doesn’t get to go to the Winter Olympics in 2030, he views it all as a positive.
“The competition is good, it’s healthy. When we had the season with Team Mouat where we won four Slams, a lot of that came about because Team Whyte were getting closer to us, they were putting a lot of pressure on us, and that gave us so much motivation," Hardie said. "Whichever team comes out on top, they’re going to need the other team to be pushing them and [at the end of the quad] there might not be a lot that separates the two teams.”
While it might be a shock to some curling fans to see a different Team Mouat and a brand-new Team Hardie next season, the competition and the rivalry are heating up across the pond, and curling fans will be watching with bated breath to see who gets the upper hand.
