A season of unprecedented success has seen British Curling’s athletes and management recognised with a succession of prestigious awards.
The Scottish Sports Awards hosted by Team Scotland and sportscotland recognised and celebrated an incredible year of standout and historic Scottish sporting performances across the past year in 2022 and curling claimed two of the most prized accolades among the awards handed out at the Edinburgh International Convention Centre last night. 
Team GB women, who enjoyed a meteoric rise during the last season of the Beijing Olympiad to claim gold at the 2022 Winter Olympics, landed the ‘Team of the Year Award’ after they won Britain’s only gold medal from that Games in what was the most successful Winter Olympics for curling to date, with our men Team Mouat also bringing home Olympic silver from their first Games.
Four time Olympian Eve Muirhead landed the biggest prize of her career when she and team mates Vicky Wright, Jen Dodds, Hailey Duff as well as alternate Mili Smith beat Japan in the final to stand on top of the Olympic podium at the Beijing Ice Cube. Skip Eve Muirhead was joined by three of her team mates at the awards ceremony, while Dodds is currently in Canada in between Grand Slam Mixed Doubles tournaments.
“We are really excited to get an award at the Scottish Sports Awards when you are up against so many great contenders,” said Eve Muirhead at the event.
“You are surrounded by absolute legends in that room and for us to be named Team of the Year is really, really special after what for us was a really fantastic 2022.” 
British Curling’s Olympic Head Coach David Murdoch won ‘Coach of the Year Award’ having just returned from the previous evening’s UK Coaching Awards in Leads where he picked up the Mussabini Medal which is presented to coaches of British performers who have achieved outstanding success on the world stage.
Murdoch, who manages the Olympic programme and pathway at the National Curling Academy in Stirling, the place he campaigned for when he was an Olympic athlete, has overseen the most successful Winter Olympic Games for curling, as well as historic successes with back-to-back World Mixed Doubles titles and gold for men and women at the same European Championships for the first time.
That array of success was partly generated by an innovative approach in both the mixed doubles arena, to allow British Curling’s top players to compete in that discipline and the women’s game, where a new squad system was introduced after Scotland’s women failed to qualify Team GB for the Olympics at the 2021 World Championships, leading to them having to qualify through a tough Olympic Qualifying event.
“It is a huge honour,” said double award winner Murdoch. 
“I am just so delighted to receive this on behalf of the athletes and the great staff that we have, it has been a real team effort by everyone to put in the work especially given the challenges of covid.
“But we all pulled together and the athletes were magnificent delivering on the world stage. We were so close to getting double gold and that would have been amazing. We had such strong resilience in both teams and we were so strong throughout the week, dealt with so much pressure and dealt with that admirably.
“It is always a challenge to come off something so great and the next four years is going to be challenging for us again. But we have set the bar high and we have to keep up there and push forward and replicate that in four years time.”
The Olympic success enjoyed by the women’s team also led to British Curling’s Executive Performance Director Nigel Holl winning the ‘Biggest Turnaround in High Performance Sport Award’ at UK Sport’s PLX Awards ceremony just last week, while the women’s team picked up the Scottish Women In Sport ‘Team of the Year’ award last month.
BBC Scotland Sport Coverage on award winners.
Congratulations to all nominees, finalists and Scottish Sports Award winners.
Team GB Women – Team of the Year
When Team Muirhead became the first women to fail to earn automatic qualification for Team GB at a Winter Olympics, by missing out on a top six spot at the 2021 World Championships, they faced a period of soul-searching and the most challenging year of their careers.
Forced to battle for the right to represent Scotland at the Winter Olympic final qualifying competition within a nine player squad, three of them – skip Eve Muirhead, Vicky Wright and Jen Dodds – earned their places along with Hailey Duff and Mili Smith, in the five player team that was sent to that competition and the preceding European Championships. 
Their performances from that point were the stuff of legend as, along with Team Mouat, the re-formed Team Muirhead became the first Scots to win the women’s and men’s European titles in the same season before, after a scratchy start, they powered through to win the Olympic qualifying tournament.
Once at the Olympics they performed inconsistently and ultimately underwent a nervous wait for other results before reaching the semi-finals where they immediately looked dead and buried on conceding a four at the opening end of their semi-final with Sweden’s Team Hasselborg, the defending champions. According to the statistical analysis their chances of winning the match at that stage were zero per cent.
Yet again, however, they defied the odds, making history with their unprecedented comeback and, after that epic victory, the final against Japan proved little more than a formality as they dominated throughout to win a first Olympic curling title for Team GB in 20 years.
On the back of that Olympic triumph, they went on, in early March, to claim top spot in the world rankings, the first time a team skipped by Muirhead, had occupied that position in close to a decade.
British Curling Olympic Head Coach David Murdoch MBE – Coach of the Year
Appointed British Curling Olympic Head Coach in 2018, two-time World Champion and 2014 Olympic finalist David Murdoch had to implement a major overhaul of the sport.
Central to that was a need to be flexible and innovative, as exemplified midway through the cycle by the decision to find a way of allowing the programme’s leading players to compete in the new Mixed Doubles discipline, as well as the Men’s and Women’s game. The way that was managed brought extraordinary rewards as Olympians Jen Dodds and Bruce Mouat became Britain’s first ever Mixed Doubles World Champions in 2021, but were unable to defend their title only because they lost the 2022 Scottish Championships to Eve Muirhead and Bobby Lammie, who then successfully defended the World title for Scotland in April 2022. 
The greatest success of all, however, came as a result of the response to Scotland’s women missing out on a top six finish at the 2021 World Championships, failing to earn Team GB automatic qualification for the Beijing Olympics and leaving them facing a cut-throat Olympic Qualifying Event (OQE).
In the face of that crisis, Murdoch had to manage the sport’s first-ever squad system at the start of the Olympic season, as nine players battled for five places. The quintet that emerged would go on to make history as, ahead of the OQE, Scotland’s men and women claimed gold at the same major championship for the first time ever at the 2021 European Championships.
That proved the precursor to Team GB’s greatest ever Olympic curling success as its men and women reached both finals, the women completing their astonishing comeback with Olympic gold, with Murdoch the lynchpin as unprecedented success was achieved in all three Olympic disciplines – with Olympic gold and silver, along with those back-to-back World Mixed Doubles titles.
Olympic images: Team GB/David Pearce.
