Back in February 2020, my senior journalist at the World Curling Federation, Mike Haggerty, and I had a meeting with the Federation’s President, Kate Caithness CBE, about creating a book charting curling’s Olympic and Paralympic journey, from being part of the Olympic Winter Games in 1924, it’s removal from the Olympic programme, then return in 1998 and all that’s happened since.
Since that meeting, Mike and I — along with our designer Douglas Colquhoun and photo manager, Richard Gray — have been working on gathering all the information we could from interviews, online resources, old archives and anything else we could get our hands on.
Mike did a fantastic job finding some previously unknown information and extracted some wonderful stories from our interviewees. Richard did a great job curating the photography throughout the book to help illustrate the stories being told and Douglas did an outstanding job in the design of the book. It is only as good as it is because of their hard work.
I had the monumental job of editing it and making sure it had a cohesive narrative, I think it was worth the effort. I’m sure the others would agree, despite the intense and long days we had in the final weeks of its production.
The book is not a commercial project. You can’t purchase it from any of your local bookshops. It was commissioned for the World Curling Federation as a historic record and a publication that could be give to their member associations and other key individuals and organisations. Though we are investigating a way for more people to get their hands on a copy.
The print run is very limited and exclusive, but should end up being quite a collectors item.
I’m really proud of what we created, but I’m also mentally exhausted from doing it on top of all the other aspects of my job with the Federation. I think it’ll take a little while to creatively recover, but I’m excited to have this one done and see what projects I can bring into the world next.