From Torino tears of joy to Beijing flagbearer: Another first for USA curling hero John Shuster

Emotion gets the better of John Shuster when talk turns to his first Olympic memory.

It was 16 years ago. In Torino, Italy. He was barely 23, just out of junior curling and a bit heavier than the lean figure he cuts today. He walked the track of the Stadio Olimpico as if in a dream – just an anonymous debutant and one of 204 athletes in that year’s Team USA.

Four-time Olympic veteran speed skater Chris Witty carried the American flag that day. And Shuster, a long way from his home in northern Minnesota, where he first followed his dad into a curling club when he was 12 years old, searched the crowd for familiar faces.

“I can remember like it was yesterday, walking around the loop in Torino during the Opening Ceremony – and I remember just feeling like I was floating,” said Shuster, skip of the first American curling team to claim Olympic gold four years ago at PyeongChang 2018. “I was looking up into the stands, trying to find my family and I’d think ‘oh maybe that’s them with the American flag over there’ – or ‘maybe it’s them over there,’ but I couldn’t really tell.”

Shuster’s family “paid a fortune to get over there” to Italy to see their boy make his Olympic debut at the Winter Games of 2006. For all they knew, it would be his last Olympics. There were no promises that the dream wouldn’t begin and end right there on Italian ice.

“And there at the end of that first loop,” Shuster, now 39, went on remembering the time, more than a decade and a half ago, when it was all still out in front of him. When his story was yet to be written. “At the end of that first loop I saw that my family had made their way all the way down to the railing – and we were able to share that moment together.

“I don’t believe I’ve ever ugly cried so hard in my whole life,” he said, pausing, the emotion of those days, those people – and all the possibilities – catching in his throat. “And I’m sitting here trying not be emotional about it because it was just so amazing to have that. It was the fact that my parents were right there to share it – right there at the end of the coolest experience of my life up to that point.”

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There was much more to come. Many more experiences to share. There was the bronze medal in Torino as part of legendary skip Pete Fenson’s team – a historic first podium for American curling that felt to Shuster at the time “almost too easy.”

And then there were the bitter disappointments of finishing last and second-to-last at Vancouver 2010 and Sochi 2014 respectively. The pain of being savaged cruelly on social media and cut by USA Curling. Shuster had to find his own way to the PyeongChang 2018 Games, where he and his fabled Team Rejects overcame a rough start to become the first Americans to wear curling gold.

All the while, through the highs and the lows, he never lost his passion for his sport. He always found the gentle poetry he feels when releasing the rock. “It’s just something about the grace of it,” Shuster says of that moment, about to let the stone go, ever so gently, into a world of possibilities. “You just can’t find it anywhere else.”

He started his own family too, something that eclipsed his gold medal by such a margin that “it’s not even close.” So it was no surprise then, that after learning he’d be the first American curler to carry his country's flag at his historic fifth Olympic Games, the first call he made was back home to his wife – herself a curler – and his two young boys.

Shuster was only just able to keep his emotions in check during the video chat. His sons, eight and six, the ones he makes bagged lunches for every day before seeing them off to school, beamed with eyes full of pride.

So it’s all coming full circle for Shuster, who’ll lead his country into the National Stadium, the Bird’s Nest as it’s known the world over, on 4 February. He'll be alongside Brittany Bowe, the American speed skater who’s gunning for 1000m gold in Beijing.

He's a long way from Torino 2006, when the 23-year-old kid Shuster, the one who “fit in at the Olympic Village a lot more” than he does now on the cusp of 40, looked up into the crowd trying to find his family — so eager for them to share in his dream.

But maybe, for this humble man who so embodies the modest spirit of his sport, it’s not that far at all.