LONDON, Feb. 26 -- With gold medals around their necks, but with no other trappings of big-time athletics -- no endorsements, no pro contracts, no steroids, no scandals -- Britain's women curlers returned home today to a rapturous reception from a nation that barely knew the team existed until its dramatic Olympic championship last week.
"This is unbelievable," said Rhona Martin, the 35-year-old mother of two who served as "skip," or captain, of the British squad. Gazing in wonder at the cheering crowds who swarmed the team in Glasgow, the normally unflappable Martin said, "It will take us a wee while to adjust, I think."
The BBC network estimates that some 6 million people stayed up past midnight last Thursday to see Martin throw a perfect bull's-eye, edging Switzerland by a single point, on the last stone of the last "end" (i.e., inning) of the last game of the Olympic tournament.
Since that moment, the nation has waited eagerly for its unlikely new athletic heroines -- known to the headline writers as the "Ice Queens" or the "Spice Curls" -- to come home.
The appeal lies partly in the gold medal itself -- it's Britain's first winter championship since Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean swept the ice-dancing competition in 1984 -- but mainly in public fascination with the no-nonsense team of five Scottish women who won it.
In an era when most Olympic winners check every move with their business agents, the British women curlers are genuine amateurs. The team includes a bank teller, an insurance claims adjuster and a secretary. Martin, the skip, had to leave her husband behind when she went to Salt Lake City because the couple couldn't afford a baby-sitter.
For Martin and her teammates, Debbie Knox, Fiona MacDonald, Margaret Morton and Janice Rankin, curling is not a business but a hobby. "For every hour we spend on the ice, we spend a couple in the bar," said Britain's coach, Hammy McMillan.
Scots say that curling was invented in Scotland, by farmers hurling cow patties down the frozen rivers some 300 years ago. Like every important aspect of Scottish culture, the game was celebrated by the national bard, Robert Burns: "When Winter muffles up his cloak. . . . When to the loughs the curlers flock. . . . "
Canada is the world's leading curling power. Britain's "Spice Curls" first leaped onto the national radar screen here when they upset Canada in the Olympic semifinals. The Canadian women took the bronze.
Today there are tens of thousands of curlers in Scotland. But in the rest of Britain, the sport is a mystery. In all of England, there's only one curling rink. Last week, as curling fever infected the whole country, there was much complaint here because the BBC's curling announcer was a Scot who just assumed that his audience knew all the rules as well as he did.
Curling -- the sport is named for the growling sound made by stones sliding across the ice -- is basically frozen shuffleboard. Players slide a 42-pound stone down an alley of ice toward a target 138 feet away. Team members carrying brooms vigorously sweep just ahead of the stone to melt the ice and thus control the stone's speed and direction.
In Olympic curling, each team throws eight stones in each of 10 ends. The team with the closest stones to the bull's-eye when the end is completed scores a varying range of points. It is legal to knock the opposing team's stones out of scoring range. Strategic decisions -- about when to aim for the scoring zone, when to "take out" an opposing stone, and when to place a guard stone to prevent such a takeout -- can be so complicated that big-league curlers have a time clock, just like chess grandmasters.
In the gold-medal match last week, the British were leading in the second-to-last end -- and then let the Swiss score a point to tie the game. That gambit gave Martin the right to throw the last stone in the final end; she and her sweepers made the last shot ricochet perfectly off a Swiss stone and settle inside the bull's-eye.
Asked today about her gold-medal stone, Martin was cool as ice. "I wasn't worried," she said calmly. "It was just a routine shot."
Never a winter sports giant, Britain had the lowest of expectations going into the Salt Lake Olympiad; sports columnists here predicted a single bronze medal in women's skeleton sledding. In fact, British athletes brought home two bronzes, in women's skeleton and men's slalom skiing, as well as the curling gold.
Until the women curlers made it to the final games, British news coverage out of Salt Lake City dealt extensively with complaints about American nationalism at the games. The Guardian newspaper called the Olympiad "a sea of jingoism." Noting the flag-waving and the repeated chants of "U-S-A," the Daily Express columnist Martin Samuel said the main story of the winter Olympics was: "Americans grab the gold medal for hooey."
The victory in women's curling brought more complaints -- because the U.S. press was said to have ignored the British triumph. "USA Today had not a word in Friday's paper of the epic encounter with Switzerland that brought the gold," complained the Times newspaper here. (USA Today did report the British win in a results box, though not the details of the game.) The Washington Post had only minor coverage of the British win, including a mention in a brief story that focused on the U.S. team's failure to win a medal.
Back home in Scotland, the five gold medalists say they will return to their jobs, heading to the curling rink when they have the time. But they may take at least one step up the ladder of big-time sports. It has been reported here that the champions are going to be offered an endorsement contract.
And what product would the curling team be paid to endorse? Brooms.
