Winter Tale: Rhona Martin

It led her to a date with fate on the Ice Sheet at Ogden in Salt Lake City and a stone to win Team GB’s first Olympic gold since Torvill & Dean.

We all know what happened next - British sporting nirvana - but how did she get there?

This tall tale started in Dunlop, East Ayrshire, known only for a cylindrical, hard, pressed cheese that bears its name. It’s not unlike cheddar but maybe don’t tell the locals.

Rhona Martin was born and raised in that village, home to a little over 800 people at the moment when 5.6 million watched her glide down the ice in a timeless grey tracksuit top.

She cast her first stone at the Greenacres club in Howwood, East Renfrewshire, taking up the sport at the age of 16.

The club would remain her reference point, and was her first port of call for a quiet drink with friends having fought through hordes that welcomed her back from Utah at Glasgow Airport.

Curling is a sport ruled by Scottish clans and Rhona first tried the sport at the behest of her brother, keenly supported by father Drew and mother Una.

Drew, who followed his daughter to every tournament, passed away in 1994 aged 67.

"He used to follow Rhona everywhere, he was so keen she would do well," Una recalled. "She was the apple of his eye."

Five years after taking up the sport, Rhona represented Scotland for the first time at the 1987 World Junior Championship.

It would be the best part of a decade before she got the chance to do so at senior level, appearing at the 1996 and 1998 European Championships and finishing second in the latter.

That silver medal would stand as her best-ever international performance other than Olympic gold, reflecting a far from straightforward rise at international and domestic level.

Rhona toiled in her attempts to claim the Scottish title and was always met with fierce competition; her first, and only, national gold came in 2000.

By that point, Team Martin was in place, with the skip joined by Janice Rankin, Fiona MacDonald, Deborah Knox and Margaret Morton.

The quartet narrowly missed the medals at the 2000 World Championships in Glasgow, finishing fourth, but were front-runners to represent Team GB at the 2002 Olympics.

In the end, Rhona’s selection proved far more complicated and rested on Julia Ewart missing her chance to capitalise at the 2001 edition of the World Championships.

It was the first of a few brushes with peril that made ‘destiny’ feel like the wrong word at the time, but absolutely the right one two decades later.

Ten months before the Games, Martin was battling back from knee surgery following an on-ice injury that kept her out for the whole of the pre-Olympic season.

Then with the Olympics just days away, she got ill with a stomach problem. Very ill. So ill that coaches considered calling up a reserve and she had to be separated from her team.

Martin said: "I was worried for a wee while I wouldn't be able to play. It was hard on the girls because they had to practise without me."

Rhona recovered just in time for the start of the round-robin competition and there was no sign of sluggishness - the team sprinted out, winning five of their first seven group games.

But the ship lurched starboard once again and back-to-back defeats to USA and Germany meant Team GB needed to win two tie-breakers just to reach the semi-finals.

Martin and crew did just that, downing Sweden 6-4 and the Germans 9-5, riding the crest of the wave to stun Canada’s 2000 world champion rink, skipped by Kelley Law, 6-5 in the semi-finals.

That win guaranteed a medal and a shot at gold, with Switzerland and Luzia Ebnöther standing in their way.

The Swiss team don’t feature in many shots in the video montages that accompany the moment - but they were well supported in the arena, with cowbells and cries aplenty.

Pretty much the whole of the British delegation were in the building - including proud Scot Craig Reedie, then chairman of the British Olympic Association and skeleton bronze medallist Alex Coomber.

So were many of the curlers’ families, including Fiona MacDonald’s husband Ewan and dad Martin and Janice Rankin’s husband, mother and father.

However, the people who mattered most to Rhona were thousands of miles away - in Dunlop, of course - where husband Keith let Jennifer and Andrew Martin stay up late.

Jennifer, nine, and Andrew, six, showed more composure than their dad who turned his back when the ‘Stone of Destiny’ was taken.

Team GB opened up a 3-1 lead after seven ends of a cagey, low-scoring final that the Swiss wiped out with singles in the eighth and ninth ends.

It came down to the last end, the last stone, with Martin needing to land a difficult draw to the button for Olympic gold.

“It wasn't the easiest shot to play because I couldn't hit it on the nose,” she said of the moment of truth. “I was panicking.

"I knew it would come off the inside but it also had to be dead roll weight and I hadn't played one like that for a wee while.

"It was just a case of having faith that I could do it. I was confident all the way as it went down the ice. I was happy when I played it, it was on the right line.

"I couldn't see it because of the sweepers' legs, but I knew it was good when they jumped in the air."

And how did it feel when the yellow number four stone struck the red just right? “Pretty damn good,” was the answer.

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