Gushue ties Brier record
Wins sixth title, most all-time
Brad Gushue and his team are champions again after winning the 2024 Brier on Sunday.
Gushue’s rink, Team Canada, won its sixth Brier championship and solidified itself amongst the top men’s curling teams in the history of the sport.
Not only did the victory over Saskatchewan’s Mike Mcewen push Gushue, Mark Nichols and Geoff Walker into a tie with Randy Ferbey for the most Brier wins in history, it represented another piece of history. For E.J. Harnden, it is his third Brier championship. For this particular version of the team, which also includes coach Caleb Flaxey, it is their second straight Brier.
The win also represented Gushue’s third straight Brier title, becoming just the second person to do that in the history of the event. The only other person to accomplish the feat is Ferbey.
“Six is incredible. For a long time, I wondered if I was ever going to get one,” Gushue told TSN’S Bryan Murdyk moments after winning. “To have the run we’ve had over the last eight years is incredible. You know, a great team.”
The win was also Gushue’s second Brier to come in Regina. He also won there in 2018.
With the win, Gushue and his team — who curl out of the St. John’s Curling Club — have positioned themselves among the greatest teams in the sport.
“The talk was six and you kind of forget about three in a row and then it’s win this one, right,” Nichols told reporters after the win. “You can’t look ahead, you can’t look behind. It’s crazy.
“I said it just then and Brad said it before. We were knocking our heads for so long to win one and now to say we’ve got six, E.J.’S got three, man, it’s been wild.”
PICKING UP STEAM
This Brier ended with a championship, but it didn’t start out well for Team Canada.
Through four games, they were 2-2, including a loss to the Northwest Territories, and the playoffs seemed far away. However, Gushue’s rink flipped the switch as champions often do and rattled off seven straight wins on the way to the Brier championship.
In the Brier final, Gushue, as he always seems to, came up with big shots when called upon.
They jumped out to a 5-1 lead after scoring three in the fourth. They gave up points in each of the next two ends, and survived some bad shots, and went into the eighth end up 5-4.
However, Mcewen blinked and let Gushue extend the lead. The Gushue rink came back and scored four combined in the eighth and ninth ends to seal the victory.
After he shot a dazzling 97 per cent in the game, the skip was named the Hec Gervais Award winner as the most valuable player of the Brier playoffs.
As a team, they were named tournament second team allstars.
“To start off the week the way we did,” Gushue said to reporters after the game, “to be honest, we lacked confidence and it was fun to see it develop the way it did as the week went on.”
The win moves Gushue’s rink into the conversation as one of the greatest curling teams of all time.
They’ll get another chance to prove that when they take on the rest of the world at the 2024 World Men’s Curling Championship in Switzerland later this month.
Gushue’s team will be looking for their first world championship since 2017. They’ve had to settle for silver each of the last three times they’ve played, including last year. They previously made the final in 2018 and 2022.
Until then, however, they get to bask in the glory of another record-setting Brier win.