Rhona Martin

MedalSport|Curling MedalGold|2002 Salt Lake City | Women's Curling MedalBottom

Rhona Martin (born October 12, 1966, Ayr, as Rhona Howie) is a Scottish curler who has skipped the Scotland women's team at both the European and World Championships, but is most famous as the skip of the Great Britain team that claimed the gold medal at the Olympic Winter Games in 2002.

For a long time best known in Scottish curling circles for her uncanny knack of repeatedly failing to win the national championships at the final hurdle, Rhona finally won the right to appear in a major international championship in 1998, where she was skip of the Scotland team that won a silver medal at the European Championships. With some significant changes in personnel, she returned to the championships in Chamonix the following year, where the team was narrowly edged out of the medal placings.

In 2000, Rhona's quartet finally broke through the psychological barrier of actually winning the Scottish championships, defeating the team led by former Olympic skip Kirsty Hay in the final, and were therefore entitled to represent Scotland at the World Championships, held that year on home soil in Glasgow. They performed well at the worlds, with a particular highlight being the defeat of the Canada side skipped by Kelley Law in the round-robin stage of the competition. However, Law earned her revenge against Scotland in the semi-finals, leading Canada to a 10-6 win, and Rhona's team were particularly disappointed to miss out on a medal of any colour by losing 10-5 to Dordi Nordby's Norwegian outfit in the subsequent play-off.

However, the fourth-place finish seemed to leave the team well-placed to secure their place as Great Britain's representatives at the Salt Lake City Olympics in 2002, selection for which was based on performances in the European and World Championships over the whole four-year Olympic cycle. Crucially, though, changes in the team's line-up meant that the European silver medal in 1998 was discounted, and this left the door open for the team skipped by former world junior champion Julia Ewart, which represented Scotland at the 2001 World Championships in Lausanne. Rhona had to wait anxiously as Ewart recovered from a slow start to string together an extraordinary sequence of wins, knowing that a gold for Scotland would take Ewart and her teammates to the Olympics, and a silver would result in a special play-off to decide the selection. However, Scotland were derailed in the semi-final by Sweden, allowing Rhona to finally look ahead to her campaign in Salt Lake City.

Illness then came close to scuppering her chances, but she did make the plane journey, and she and her teammates found their Olympic form early, reaching the brink of qualification for the semi-finals by winning five out of their first seven matches. However, they failed to convert a golden opportunity against a USA team that came back to win with a steal at the death. This had a noticeably morale-sapping effect on Rhona, with the team succumbing with surprising ease to Germany in the concluding round-robin match. The team's chances of progressing were thus taken out of their hands, with a Swiss win over Germany now required to keep them in contention. That duly materialised, but they were still left with the daunting task of winning two successive tie-break matches just to reach the semi-finals. The prospect of a medal, which had days earlier seemed tantalisingly within reach, now looked very distant indeed.

However, Rhona and her team were surprisingly dominant in the first tie-break match against the multiple world championship-winning Sweden rink, and then claimed revenge against Germany to reach the semis. Awaiting them there was Kelley Law's Canadian rink, who three of the Scottish team had lost to while playing for Scotland at the same stage of the 2000 World Championships. Rhona felt that this experience proved invaluable as they surged to a wholly unexpected win, which guaranteed them a medal. That medal then turned from a likely silver to an actual gold after Rhona successfully judged an incredibly difficult draw with her last stone in the final against Switzerland. The team of Rhona, Debbie Knox, Fiona MacDonald and Janice Rankin thus became Great Britain's first gold medallists in any sport at the Winter Olympics since Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean danced to "Bolero" in 1984.

Perhaps drained by their win, the team lost to Jackie Lockhart's rink in the three-match final of the Scottish Championships, played within days of their return to Scotland. However, Lockhart subsequently made headlines by winning the world championships for Scotland, and by selecting precisely the same stone used by Rhona to seal victory in the Olympics for her own winning delivery. The ubiquitous rock was dubbed the Stone of Destiny, and is now housed in a Scottish sports museum.

In 2005, Rhona was back on the world stage, when her all-star team (including Lockhart at the second position) finished 5th at the European Championships.

Prior to the 2006 Winter Olympics, it was reported that Martin was living on welfare and that her financial problems were causing her to live apart from her husband. Her husband Keith had recently had his computer business go "bad" and they were forcedFact|date=March 2008 to move into government housing. Martin had considered quitting curling, but her two children encouraged her to stay. Martin skipped the British olympic team to the 2006 Winter Olympics. [http://www.cbc.ca/olympics/sports/curling/stories/index.shtml?/story/olympics/national/2006/01/12/Sports/martin_rhona060112.html] Despite the team's best efforts, Rhona's squad were knocked out of the 2006 Winter Olympics, even after beating the USA 10-4 in just 6 ends. The only thing that would have led them through was if Denmark had beaten Canada in their match, but this was not to be. The Danish team levelled at 8 - 8 but Canada took 1 in the last end, knocking the GB team out and depriving Rhona and her team of the opportunity to defend their Gold medal from 2002.

Teammates

*Kelly Wood (third)
*Jackie Lockhart (second)
*Lynn Cameron (lead)
*Deborah Knox (alternate)

Awards

*Frances Brodie Award: 2000