Curling, Men

Four teams had entered for the competition, but Switzerland withdrew its team. This was a shame, as the Swiss were expected to have given the British team some opposition. They now won two lop-sided matches against Sweden (38-6) and France (46-4). The winning team consisted entirely of Scots, including father Willie Jackson and his son Laurence. Willie, the team’s skip, later became the president of the RCCC.

The 1924 curling competition has probably one of the highest average competitor ages of all events in Olympic history. The youngest known competitor is Laurence Jackson, who was 23, but most of the players were over the age of forty. Ödlund’s teammate Carl August Kronlund was the oldest in competition, with 58.

Although the Swedes only played two matches, eight players competed, with only a completely different team in both matches. One of the Swedes, Johan Petter Åhlén, was an accomplished businessman. Starting out with a small-town mail-order business, he eventually founded a department store chain and a publishing house, both bearing his name to this day.

A few days after their victory, the Olympic champions played a friendly match against a team of American jockeys engaged in the annual Sankt Moritz winter horse race meetings and were shockingly defeated by the novice team which included Epsom Derby winners Frank O’Neill and Matt McGee. It was not until after the British team had paid their forfeit of a lavish dinner for the winning team that McGee revealed the secret of the American success – he has surreptitiously coated the underneath of their opponents’ stones with a “good and plenty” amount of glue.