Jennifer Dodds aiming for Olympic medal with childhood friend Bruce Mouat

“Jen is just full of life. She’s just so bubbly. She’s always smiling on the ice and that feeds into team dynamics so well with me because, you know, I love to kind of have that banter on the ice. We love to just kind of have a laugh and a joke, and we enjoy the times we play together.”

So says fellow curler, Bruce Mouat of his mixed team partner, Jen Dodds, the relaxed nature of the relationship flowing having known each other from childhood. The dynamic is such that the pair are in with a good chance of a medal in the mixed team event at Beijing 2022 especially considering they are also current world champions. The duo won the title on home ice in Scotland in May, beating Norway 9-7 in a hard fought final.

Both have qualified for their respective women’s and men’s events, too, although the women’s team had a surprising battle to qualify considering recent Olympic successes.

Early days

The pair met each other in the early 2000s, when Dodds was 11 years old and Mouat, eight, with Dodds – indicative of the banter the duo enjoy – describing Mouat at that first meeting as “the same height as a curling brush”.

Dodds started playing the sport at the same time as Bruce’s older brother but the younger Mouat was itching to have a go instead of having to sit at the side and watch his sibling.

"You could tell straight away, he was like, ‘I want to play, I want to play'," says Dodds.

The duo both have a fiercely competitive drive but differ in their on-ice characters. Dodds is more analytical, says Mouat, and loves to have all the information while he just wants to get on and play. Similarities include both loving coffee and playing games, from cards to Mario Cart.

Despite their long history, the pair didn’t play together until March 2020 when, prior to the curling season, players were asked with whom they wanted to play. Dodds and Mouat both put each other as top picks for the mixed event, which was then ratified by British Curling.

A year later they were mixed team world champions as Scotland – the nation represents Team GB at the Olympic Games – which gives rise to hope for a medal at the Beijing 2022 Olympic Winter Games.

History repeated?

Team GB sit third on the curling all-time Olympic Winter Games medal table – behind Canada and Sweden – with two golds, one silver and one bronze medal.

Great Britain’s men won the first ever Olympic curling gold medal at the debut Olympic Winter Games in Chamonix in 1924. There was a second-place finish at Sochi 2014, with the women’s team claiming bronze at the same Games.

But it was the gold won at the Salt Lake City Games in 2002 that put curling on the map in Great Britain, with more than six million people staying up late into the night to watch skip’s Rhona Martin’s ‘Stone of Destiny’, claim the Olympic title with a dramatic last stone.

"I remember back in 2002, when Rhona won her gold medal,” said Dodds of her ‘earliest memory’, “that was the first time I really sat and watched curling at the Olympics.”

Mixed curling made its debut at PyeongChang 2018, but Team GB had no representatives with Mouat missing out on a qualifying spot with his then partner, Gina Aitken, by one place. This time there were no qualifying issues and the twosome are well placed to aim for a medal.

“We were good friends before we became teammates, so everything was natural to us," said Dodds.

“If we need to have an honest conversation, we just know it’s to make the team better and we don't take things personally.

"The dynamic has been really natural, which has been good for both of us."

Hopefully it will be good for fans of Team GB, too.