It’s a Thursday evening in November. A pub in Glasgow’s Merchant City. Four males, all in regards to the age of 30, are squeezed round a small desk, consuming and speaking about what the subsequent few months may carry. Nobody recognises them.
That similar pub three months later. Screens exhibiting a Celtic sport are modified so the patrons can watch the curling. Almost everyone seems to be anxiously staring on the TVs, prepared those self same 4 males to attain a Winter Olympic last.
Chances are they are going to be doing the identical on Saturday (18:05 GMT), when Team GB’s Bruce Mouat, Grant Hardie, Hammy McMillan and Bobby Lammie tackle Canada with a gold medal at stake.
“Our gold medal,” as Mouat referred to it after the epic semi-last 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 consider to be their future – by upgrading their silver medal from Beijing 4 years in the past – is what these 4 Scots have travelled to Cortina to do.
Since that 2022 close to miss, Team Mouat have come to dominate males’s curling, profitable two World Championships and including one other couple of European crowns, in addition to a file 12 Grand Slam titles.
At instances, they’ve been unbeatable.
That cloak of invincibility slipped in the course of the spherical-robin levels right here – leaving qualification out of their fingers – however that fright has now been forgotten, changed with the return of a transparent-eyed give attention to the duty in hand.
But who’re these 4 younger males who’ve now caught the nation’s consideration? And what makes them greater than the sum of their components?
