STONE of destiny
From Bambi on ice to an Olympic champion... Rhona Howie’s unlikely rise to stardom was centred around a raw determination that captured the hearts of an enthralled nation
Nothing ever runs smoothly in life. You have to deal with hurdles but you can’t just give up
SHE fell. She faltered. She strove and achieved gold that was stolen from her. But Rhona Howie can relax into the goodness of life simply because she has regularly overcome the hardness it can also offer.
She has slipped but she gets back up again. ‘My first step on to the ice was when I was 17,’ says the curler who was to skip Great Britain to the gold medal in the Winter Olympics of 2002. ‘I was looking for a hobby and it was either curling or golf. My brother Ian took me to Greenacres and I hated it the first time. It was cold. I fell. Ian called me Bambi on ice. I wondered: “Where’s the fun in this?”.’
Ian, who was a Scottish junior champion who also contested world championships, persuaded his sister to return. ‘I am glad I did,’ she adds with some understatement.
Curling has shaped her life. It provides a living as she works with the World Curling Federation in an organisational role while also commentating at major events. But it has given her an understanding of herself. There has been the ingestion of the odd bitter pill among the tastes of glory.
The high point of her career, of course, was that moment in Salt Lake City when she bent down and slid to deliver the stone that beat Switzerland in the gold-medal match. Yet that successful shot at glory had been preceded by frustration and disappointment.
‘I had lost at the final hurdle in so many
Scottish championships,’ she says. ‘I knew how it felt to come up short.’
She also had overcome a more recent obstacle.
‘I didn’t know that I would play for certain until the day of the opening ceremony,’ she adds. ‘I am never ill but I wasn’t well at the holding camp and had to leave the team. It was a stomach issue and I had a small op when I came back home.’
The victory was also followed by private problems with her marriage ending and then reverting from the name Martin to her maiden name of Howie. There were lurid tales of penury but she dismisses them.
‘Nothing runs smoothly in life,’ she says. ‘It is a series of hurdles but you just have to keep going. You fall down, but you get back up again.
‘When I speak to schoolkids, I tell them nothing in life runs the way you want it. You have to deal with hurdles. But you can’t ever give up. I lost so many Scottish finals and I could have given up but it made me a better player and a better person. Sport gives you so many life skills. I know what it has given me but I also know that a lot of people helped me to get to the level where I won.’
She was fuelled by an instinctive desire, adding: ‘True grit. Determination. I suppose these were in me. Growing up with four brothers, I always stood up for myself. It was instilled in me: never give up.’
Now, at 53, she has tempered that drive with the lessons of experience. ‘As you become older, you get more philosophical,’ she explains. ‘I am more focused on how are we going to solve this? People can dwell on the problem rather than focus on a solution.’
This attitude served her well in her elite coaching role with British and Scottish curling teams and in her subsequent spell at Bowls Scotland, where she led the high-performance programme.
‘The bowls? I suppose it was a surprise to some people but it was good to be involved in the high performance side of another sport,’ she says. ‘I obviously wasn’t coaching, it was more to do with managing programmes and setting up academies. It was at a stage of my life when I was asking myself: “What will I do now?” I always like a new challenge.’ But she returned to curling. ‘I loved the sport once I got into it,’ she continues. ‘I practised all the time, playing about with stones and angles. I enjoyed being the skip, too. I enjoyed the thrill of playing that last stone.
‘Every game you play is different. You have your tactics but you don’t know how it is going to play out on the ice and I liked that. I have met so many people from all over the world and I saw so much of the world. I have friendships that will last for ever. That is special.’
It can all be distilled and served with ice in one spine-chilling moment.
‘EVERYBODY remembers the last stone. They don’t remember the 39 hours before it,’ says Howie.
She is referring to the difficult draw shot that won the gold medal and to the slog that preceded that career-defining moment.
‘We had to play nine games in the first round, then two play-off matches, then the semi and then the final. It was 40 hours of play. So it was relief that followed the last shot,’ she says.
‘I was just thinking: “I have a shot to play to win the game”. I was not thinking of a gold medal. Or anything else. It had been such a long haul. I thought: “The team has played this end well. If I miss this, they will kill me”.’
There is a burst of laughter at this but Howie recalls the stress of the tournament: ‘Mentally, it was a huge challenge. You need to be physically fit but you need to be mentally fit, too. If you make the wrong call at the wrong time, you can lose everything. You have to be able to focus, block out the crowd noise. I had to learn that.’
She was especially grateful to the team’s psychologist for ridding her of one destructive trait.
‘How to bin bad shots. I couldn’t do that. A bad shot would fester for three ends. I had to work hard at eradicating that,’ she says. She succeeded. The team — Howie, Debbie Knox, Fiona MacDonald, and Janice Rankin — became the first British gold medallists at the Winter Olympics since Torvill and Dean in the ice skating in 1984.
‘We had no idea of the reaction back home,’ says Howie. ‘We were on the front page of every paper… we couldn’t believe it. The media were going bananas and I
The medal is long gone. I had to say goodbye to it
thought: “My goodness what have we done?”. We were at the right place at the right time.’
This is not just an example of her humility but a recognition that the sport was changing in terms of professionalism, preparation and commitment. Howie was ready to capitalise on that.
Her victory raised the profile of the sport in Scotland, ushering in later talents such as Eve Muirhead. But it also heralded the explosion of curling as a worldwide sport.
‘There was once a core of 30 competing nations, now there are 64. Brazil, Spain and Nigeria are all competitors,’ she reveals.
This places an added strain on Scottish and Great British teams. ‘We need to keep working to keep on top,’ she says. ‘Other countries are investing, so we have a challenge. How do you get the youngsters in? You need facilities, you need to take the sport into schools. There is no magic wand, just hard work. I am hopeful, though. We have the talent.’
There is one lingering regret over a career that provided fulfilment. ‘Long gone, unfortunately,’ she says of the gold medal that was stolen from Dumfries Museum in 2014. ‘I have had to say cheerio to it.’
The thief was identified and convicted but the medal was never found. The International Olympic Committee provided a substitute but it was more a memento than a replacement. ‘It is about a third of the weight of the original and nothing like it,’ she says. ‘It’s a pity because I loved taking it into school. I always thought if one kid is inspired… but it’s not to be.’ However, she adds: ‘Someone once told me that you were a world champion for a year and an Olympic champion for life. I suppose that is true.’ And there was the shot. And the repercussion. ‘We went back to the village and Steve Redgrave said: “Congratulations Rhona” and gave me a kiss. I was ecstatic,’ says Howie. She adds of the fivetime Olympic gold medal winner: ‘Steve Redgrave. Steve Redgrave knew my name.’ Suddenly, we all did.