Canada's John Morris Coached Australia to Olympic Curling History. Now He'll Compete Against Them

BEIJING — The biggest Australia curling fan here wears Canada’s colors. His name is John Morris, and he is a two-time Olympic gold medalist who is trying to earn his third this month at the Ice Cube. But when he’s not pursuing his own goal, he’s celebrating Australia's Tahli Gill and Dean Hewitt for achieving theirs.

“I think it was really inspiring to see that young athletes with a dream to go to the Olympics, who had a long way to go, were able to reach their full potential,” says Morris, 43.

Maybe not their full potential: After a 7–3 loss to Italy on Saturday, Gill and Hewitt are winless in seven games, putting them in last place in the mixed doubles tournament with two games left. If they had caught a few breaks, Morris said, that figure would be different: Four of their losses came by one point. But this journey wasn’t about Olympic gold for them. It was about their Olympic goal.

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When Gill, 22, and Hewitt, 27, qualified for the Games in December, they became the first Australian curlers to earn an Olympic berth—and an underdog story from a nation that lacks a dedicated curling facility. Until they moved to Canada to work with Morris, Gill and Hewitt lived 1,100 miles apart—Gill in subtropical Brisbane, Hewitt in temperate Melbourne—and trained separately once a week at rinks after the hockey players and figure skaters had finished churning up the ice.

“Literally all they do is, like, run a Zamboni over it and we give it a quick pebble and away we go,” said Gill, referring to the water curlers spray on the rink to form tiny chunks of ice that help the stones curl. “So the quality is very different to what we’re seeing here.”

Still, those weekly sessions were luxurious compared to their other training method: practicing sweeping in their kitchens.

“There’s one spot on the floor that’s extremely shiny,” said Gill, laughing.

They receive some funding from the Olympic Winter Institute of Australia, but hey had to schedule all this around their real lives; Gill is in her final year of studying to be an elementary school teacher at Queensland University of Technology Brisbane and recently quit her waitressing job, and Hewitt works as an exercise physiologist with side gigs at a supermarket and an ice rink. They hope that their success will encourage the government to build a curling rink in Australia.

Erick W. Rasco/Sports Illustrated

Hewitt was born into a curling family—his Canadian mother, Lynn, taught his Australian father, Steve, to play, and Steve made it as far as eighth place at the 1992 Olympics, where curling was a demonstration sport. Gill picked up the game at 11 after her mother watched Olympic curling and started a club with a few Canadian expats.

Four years ago, the pair teamed up in an attempt to make the Games. Two years ago, they asked the best curler they knew—Canada's Morris—if he would coach them. They worked together remotely and at competitions for a year until Morris, who works as a firefighter and has two young children, asked them if they wanted to move to his hometown of Canmore, Alberta. Once the border reopened, they found a townhouse near Morris and trained alongside him and his partner, Rachel Homan.

Gill and Hewitt rave about Morris’s leadership and his kindness, the way he sent them a good-luck card before the Olympics that ended with: “Friend first. Coach second.” Gill jokes she might move to Canmore fulltime. And they gush about their love for the sport—Gill for the combination of strength and finesse, Hewitt for the camaraderie.

Morris, who won his first Olympic gold on the men’s team in 2010 and his second in mixed doubles in ’18, found that his students gave him as much as he gave them. “They were just super positive and so keen and just ate up anything I said—and it worked,” he said. “I've never coached before, and I'm like, ‘Guys, I really think we should do this’ and then they did it and it worked, and it was just really cool to see that. And it was really refreshing to see how positive and keen their attitude was. I’m near the end of my career, and it's hard to find that motivation sometimes, so seeing that inspired me.”

Australia is scheduled to play Canada in the mixed doubles tournament on Sunday at 8:05 p.m. Beijing time. No matter the outcome, Morris will win.