Broom Technology Statement from 22 Elite Teams
In the autumn of 2015, curling did something almost no professional sport ever manages: its best players agreed, together, to make themselves worse. Twenty-two of the top men’s and women’s teams on the World Curling Tour signed a joint statement pledging not to use a new generation of broom heads — the episode that would become known as Broomgate.
What set it off
The trouble began the previous season, when rinks started sweeping with stiff synthetic pads built around so-called directional fabric. The best known was Hardline’s icePad, pioneered by Mike McEwen’s Manitoba rink. Where a traditional brush warms and polishes the pebble, these pads abraded it — “sandpaper on a microscopic level” — scratching a grain into the ice that a skilled sweeper could aim.
The effect was startling. With the new fabric, two sweepers could hold a stone dead straight, or even bend it the wrong way, rescuing a badly thrown rock and steering it “like a joystick.” Commentators dubbed the worst offenders “Frankenbrooms.” If sweeping could override the throw, then the throw — the very skill the sport is built on — no longer mattered as much.
If sweeping can override the throw, what is left of the shot?
The statement
Rather than wait for officials, the athletes acted first. In October 2015, 22 elite teams put their names to a statement agreeing to stop using the new abrasive fabrics; separately, some fifty of the world’s top curlers signed a joint pledge to the same effect. Direct rivals — teams chasing the same national and world titles — chose the long-term health of their sport over a short-term edge.
The Sweeping Summit
Resolution came in May 2016 at the Sweeping Summit in Kemptville, Ontario. Athletes, ice-makers, officials and scientists from Canada’s National Research Council tested more than fifty brush variants using throwing robots and GPS tracking to measure exactly what each fabric did to a running stone. For 2016-17, custom and directional broom heads were banned, and only a single certified fabric — the now-familiar uniform yellow — was permitted.