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Curler Bruce Mouat: ‘I realised it really didn’t matter what my sexuality was’
The British double gold contender at the Winter Olympics in Beijing talks about the decision to come out shaping his life
The truth is that after 200 or so years of curling no one understands why the stone curls. Really. The laws of physics suggest the stone’s path should bend in the opposite direction to its rotation, so if you spin a stone to the right, it would travel to the left, and vice versa. In fact it does the exact opposite. Researchers have come up with three competing theories why, but no one knows which is right. “Yeah, it hurts my head to even think about how it does it, so I generally don’t,” says Bruce Mouat. “I just accept that it does.” It is one of the few things about the sport Mouat hasn’t turned his mind to.
You’re going to see a lot of Mouat in the next couple of weeks. He is competing in the men’s event and the mixed doubles in Beijing, the latter of which starts on Wednesday, and his teams are among the favourites for both. It means he’s going to be competing for 16 days in a row, “which is obviously going to be quite intense”, and, if they play out as he hopes, that his life may be about to change in ways he doesn’t yet understand. These are Mouat’s first Games but he remembers the public’s fleeting obsession with Eve Muirhead’s team, who won bronze in 2014, and David Murdoch’s, who won silver the same year. He was too young to recall Rhona Martin’s gold in 2002, “but since then I’ve watched it a hundred times since.”
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