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Curling at the Olympics

Curling was in the very first Winter Olympics, and then spent eighty years being told it had not been. Here is every medal since, and the correction that put the first ones back.

Last updated 2026-08-18

• 20Olympic curling medal events contested
• 1924the first, in Chamonix — and it counts
• 14medals for Canada, the most of any nation
• 3disciplines: men, women, mixed doubles

The 1924 problem#

Curling was played at the first Winter Olympic Games, at Chamonix in 1924. Three teams entered — Great Britain, Sweden and France — and Great Britain won.

Then the record forgot. For eighty years the 1924 competition was catalogued as a demonstration event, and curling was described everywhere, including by the sport itself, as having entered the Olympics in 1998. The players who won it were not Olympic champions, and by the time anyone checked, they were all dead.

In the mid-2000s the Glasgow Herald went back to the contemporary records and found that the competition had in fact been an official part of the programme. In 2006 the IOC accepted it. The 1924 medals were recognised retrospectively, Great Britain gained a gold medal eighty-two years after winning it, and curling's Olympic history was extended backwards by seventy-four years in a single administrative decision.

Between the two there were demonstrations: Lake Placid in 1932, Innsbruck in 1964, Calgary in 1988 and Albertville in 1992. None of those carry medals. The IOC granted full status on 21 July 1992, to take effect at Nagano in 1998 with eight teams per gender, expanded to ten at Salt Lake City in 2002.

The all-time medal table#

Computed from the results below rather than transcribed, so the two cannot disagree.

Two things stand out. The first is how close Sweden is to Canada, which surprises people who assume Canadian dominance carries over from the world championships — where it emphatically does. The second is Switzerland: nine medals, more than Great Britain, and only one of them gold. That is a genuinely unusual shape for a medal table and reflects a country that qualifies for everything and has repeatedly lost finals.

Every medal, by discipline#

Most recent first.

Men — since 1924#

Women — since 1998#

Mixed doubles — since 2018#

Wheelchair curling at the Paralympics#

Wheelchair curling is a Paralympic sport, not an Olympic one. It was introduced as a discipline at Crans-Montana in 2000, held its first world championship in January 2002, and gained Paralympic medal status for the Torino Games in 2006. The field expanded to twelve teams for Beijing in 2022.

It is not a modified version of the same game so much as a different one: there is no sweeping at all, the stone may be delivered with a stick, and teams must be mixed-gender. That combination makes it, arguably, the purest test of delivery in the sport — every stone finishes where it was thrown. The rules are set out on the wheelchair curling page.

What Olympic status changed#

A great deal, and not all of it in the places people expect.

• Funding, everywhere except Canada. National associations in curling countries are mostly small volunteer organisations, and Olympic status routes state sports funding to them. Almost every association outside the traditional heartlands dates its growth from an Olympic cycle.
• An audience with no idea what it is watching. Every four years, tens of millions of people encounter curling for the first time and immediately want to know why they are shouting and what the numbers mean. This site exists partly because of that — see how curling works and the glossary.
• Mixed doubles. The discipline was invented in the 2000s and is now, by some distance, the fastest-growing form of the game — because it needs two players rather than four, takes about half as long, and fits an Olympic broadcast slot. See mixed doubles.
• Scrutiny of the equipment. A sport with an Olympic television audience cannot have an unresolved argument about whether the brushes work too well. Broomgate was settled in eleven months, and the Olympic cycle is a large part of why.

Sources#

• Curling at the Winter OlympicsThe full podium lists this page derives its medal table from. The derived table reproduces the published one exactly, in all three columns.
• Primary History of curling World CurlingFor the 1992 IOC decision, the field sizes at Nagano and Salt Lake City, and the Paralympic and mixed doubles dates.
• Olympic curling history: champions, records, highlights NBC OlympicsOn the Herald research and the 2006 IOC recognition of the 1924 competition.
• Olympedia — curlingAthlete-level results for every Games, if you need the names rather than the nations.

The five hundred years before this The newest discipline