In almost every event at Milan Cortina, there will be a cavalcade of companies vying for our attention, showcasing their latest equipment designs and technology. The Olympics are the pinnacle of competition for the athletes and the biggest shop window for a global sporting goods industry worth more than $600 billion a year.
But then there is curling, a sport with a unique story to tell about its most important piece of equipment.
Every stone you will see gliding along the ice at the Cortina Curling Olympic Stadium over the next couple of weeks will have been quarried from one uninhabited Scottish island, shaped and polished at an old factory in a small town on the mainland, and signed off on by a guy who has handled every stone thrown at an Olympics since 2006.
The island is Ailsa Craig, the factory is owned by Kays Scotland, and the production supervisor is John Brown, a 60-year-old craftsman who does not even play the game.
Don’t believe me? It’s OK, I didn’t believe me, either. So I paid them a visit to see for myself.
The island
Well, I tried to visit.
Ailsa Craig is a huge lump of hardened magma that oozed from an extinct volcano whose sides, made of weaker rock, have fallen away over the last 60 million years. Almond-shaped and steep-sided, it is two and a half miles around (4 km), with a highest point of 1,120 feet (340 metres).
Sometimes called “Paddy’s Milestone,” because it is approximately halfway on a sea journey from Belfast, Northern Ireland, to Glasgow, it is 10 miles (16 km) off the South Ayrshire coast in the Firth of Clyde, the body of water that separates the River Clyde from the Irish Sea.
It has been a haven for persecuted Catholics, a defence against the Spanish Armada, a prison, and a smuggler’s cove. Its only surviving buildings are the remains of a castle, a lighthouse and the old quarry manager’s office. There is a freshwater spring but no other amenities.
For 40 years, the easiest way to get to the island was via the M.F.V. Glorious, a fishing boat owned by local skipper Mark McCrindle that took up to 12 day-trippers from Girvan Harbour. Sadly, McCrindle passed away after a short illness a few weeks before my visit in October.
In a tribute on the boat’s Facebook page, McCrindle’s cousin Craig noted that Mark had “made hundreds of thousands of people’s wishes to visit Ailsa Craig come to fruition and provided them with memories that would last a lifetime.” He signed off by wishing him “fair winds and following seas.”
The granite cliffs of Ailsa Craig provide the perfect material for curling stones — a combination of two different types of microgranite. (Andy Buchanan / Getty Images)
An internet search threw up several alternative vessels to take me to the island, but one had gone out of business, another only makes the trip in the summer, and a third never replied. I did find someone 30 miles up the coast in Troon who said they would have taken me on their high-speed rib … but someone had just stolen it.
It was at this point that I realised I was not meant to set foot on Ailsa Craig. I was also beginning to understand why Kays’ curling stones start at just over £700 ($960). But getting there is only the beginning of the story behind that price tag.
The stone
I suspect the geologists among you will be wondering why we cannot just make curling stones from the granite that is lying around in almost every country on the planet. After all, the Egyptians built pyramids with the stuff, you will find it at the Colosseum in Rome, and the national memorial at Mount Rushmore is carved from it.
Unfortunately, none of that granite is good enough for Kays.
Ailsa Craig’s granite is actually microgranite, which means the magma cooled more quickly, making it denser and harder than the run-of-the-mill stuff you use for constructing Wonders of the World. To quote the Scottish Geology Trust, Ailsa Craig’s microgranite has “no crustal contamination” and, as an added bonus, it contains the “comparatively rare alkaline ferromagnesian minerals riebeckitic arfvedsonite, hedenbergite-acmite and aenigmatite.”
If you take nothing else from this piece, store those away for your next game of Scrabble.
Kays, in one form or another, has been making curling stones from Ailsa Craig’s microgranite for at least 175 years. It actually uses two types of microgranite found on the island: Common Green and Blue Hone.
As the name suggests, Common Green just needs picking up from the shore on the island’s south side. Kays uses it to make the curling stone’s body, as it is the perfect material for something that crashes into other stones at low temperatures.
Blue Hone is found on the island’s north side and needs to be more actively quarried. Once upon a time, that was with a pickaxe or dynamite, but it is now more sensitively removed by filling holes drilled into the rock face with liquid gas that then expands, splitting the rock. Blue Hone is highly water-resistant, which makes it ideal for the “running edge” — that is, the only part of the stone’s bottom to actually touch the ice.
This combination is Kays’ secret sauce, as it has had the exclusive rights to quarry Ailsa Craig’s Blue Hone and Common Green since 1988, a deal it extended for 30 years in 2020.
The harvest
For most of the island’s history, Kays did not need to visit often, or take much stone back with it when it did. Curling was in decline in Scotland and had only really caught on elsewhere in Canada, a few European countries and a handful of northern U.S. states. The fact that the stones last so long did not help much, either.
Curling was included in the programme of the first Winter Olympics in Chamonix in 1924, when a British team from the Royal Caledonian Curling Club smashed the hosts, France, 46-4. The sport missed out in 1928 but was back again as a demonstration event in 1932, when Canada’s emergence as the centre of the curling universe was reflected with victory in Lake Placid, N.Y.
Curling then went into a long, dark winter, as it was ignored by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for five decades. But it returned as a demonstration sport in 1988 and 1992, and was finally added to the official programme in 1998, by which time Kays’ exclusive access to Ailsa Craig was starting to make sense.
In 1988, it took away 210 tons of Common Green, enough for more than 1,000 stones. In 2002, Kays came back with a bigger boat and harvested 1,500 tons of Common Green and 150 tons of Blue Hone.
A worker crafts curling stones at Kays’ factory on the Scottish mainland. A slab of the more water-resistant Blue Hone granite is placed inside a block of Common Green to create the stones. (Jeff J. Mitchell / Getty Images)
At this point, Kays had supplied stones to every single Olympic curling tournament but not on an exclusive basis, and it was also using granite sourced from Trefor Quarry in north Wales, once the world’s largest granite quarry. But by 2006, when Kays became the sole supplier, it was only using Ailsa Craig stone.
Olympic status was a game-changer for the sport, as World Curling’s membership has tripled since 1998, growing to 74 nations. Representation at the Olympics has also grown, with 14 different nations competing at Beijing 2022, up from 10 in 1998, and China, Japan and South Korea have all been among the medallists at recent Games.
So, Kays’ next harvest in 2013 was for 2,500 tons of Common Green and 500 tons of Blue Hone. That lasted until 2020, when similar amounts were taken back to the mainland. And when I visited Kays in late October, preparations were well advanced for their next visit in November.
Ricky English, operations manager at Kays and my tour guide at the factory, explained that the company has to complete a 52-page environmental impact report, bring a conservation consultant with them to make sure nobody upsets the birds or grey seals, and put rat traps in the Red Baroness, the landing craft they use, in order to keep Ailsa Craig rat-free.
Listening to Ricky and his dad, Jim, the company’s managing director and a former soldier who has worked around the world in the offshore oil industry, it soon became clear these “harvests” were more like military operations.
For example, they have to happen in November, when the seas are rough, to avoid interfering with bird-breeding season. As several years pass between their visits, they must create a new ramp on the beach to get their dump trucks and loaders ashore, and then clear a road along the shoreline so they can get the five-ton boulders back onto the Red Baroness. Laden with skips, the landing craft goes back and forth to Girvan for several days.
The agreement with the marquess allows Kays to take up to 25,000 tons of granite off the island by 2050. The company is unlikely to need that much, but even if they did, there would still be plenty left.
“Ailsa Craig is like one of those large tubs of ice cream you get in those fridges at the seaside,” says Ricky English. “And we’re only taking a teaspoonful.”
The factory
Ricky tells me this in front of a large photograph of the island in the cramped downstairs office at Kays’ factory and headquarters in Mauchline, a town of about 4,000 people.
English initially arrived in 2021 when a friend saw a news item about Kays on TV. By this stage in his globe-trotting career, Jim had become a business turnaround specialist, but none of his previous rescue acts had gotten under his skin like Kays.
“This is the best story,” says Jim, with a grin. “What can be better than making something that wins Olympic medals from something as magical as Common Green and Blue Hone?”
And having spent an hour on the shop floor in Ricky’s company, it is obvious Kays has got to him, too. The pride in what has been made there in the past, and continues to be made now, is palpable.
After leaving Ailsa Craig, the granite boulders go to a stonemason in Newton Stewart, about 50 miles south of Mauchline, where they are sliced into slabs with a diamond wire saw. The stonemason then uses a drill to core out half a dozen or so cylinder blocks from each slab. These are called “cheeses” and they are what arrives in Mauchline to be shaped, polished and finished.
The factory is actually several buildings of varying ages joined together. A couple of them are just used for storage, with a view to turning them into a visitor centre at some point.
Ricky hands me some ear protectors and shows me into the first room where the Common Green cheeses are knocked out of the slabs and a coring machine cuts out the “ailsert” pocket where the Blue Hone running band sits.
We then move into the next room, where half a dozen guys in dusty overalls are operating huge lathes and polishing machines, which first round off the cheeses so they look like curling stones, and then bring out the stones’ distinctive mottled greenish-grey appearance. They all let me see what they are doing, but these are serious machines, so the vibe is businesslike.
In the middle of the room, there are racks of Blue Hone ailserts ready to be glued into the cored-out space in the stones. Kays sells “single” stones, with just one Blue Hone running band, and “doubles,” with two running bands so you unbolt the handle, flip it over and use the other side of the stone for a longer life. Ricky tells me the gloopy grey substance they use to keep the ailserts in place is aviation glue designed to withstand extreme temperatures, stresses and strains.
There were no more than a dozen staff on site on the day of my visit, and they made a dozen stones, each one taking about four hours.
The craftsman
The last room in the working part of the factory was quieter than the other two, as this is where the stones are given their final checks, weighed, engraved with a serial number, and packed for shipping. Ricky explained they measure everything to a minute detail and then use an algorithm to work out how much each stone will curl so it can be matched to an individual player’s preference.
Overseeing this end of the operation was John Brown, a former fitter who joined Kays in 2006, which means he has probably polished every single stone used at an Olympics for the past 20 years.
John Brown inspects a curling stone in 2022. “Oh, I’ll be watching for sure,” Brown, a Team GB supporter, says of Olympic curling. (Jeff J. Mitchell, Andy Buchanan / Getty Images)
Like the rest of his colleagues, Brown is too modest to make a big fuss but admitted to getting a lot of job satisfaction from seeing his handiwork on TV every four years, especially when a Scottish team wins, as they did at Beijing 2022 and may well do again in Milan Cortina, as Team Great Britain.
“Oh, I’ll be watching for sure, and it was great when (former Team GB women’s skipper) Eve Muirhead won last time,” said Brown. “I’ve got a good feeling about (the GB team skippered by Bruce) Mouat, too.”
Brown, however, has never played the game.
Not yet, anyway. There is still plenty of time for him to try a sport that prides itself on its accessibility to all ages.
Neatly stacked in the corner of factory’s largest room were crates of stones ready to be shipped to a curling club in Beijing. Each stone weighs just under 20 kilograms (44 pounds), so the postage-and-packing bill for that order will be pretty hefty. World Curling’s batch of 164 stones for use in Cortina was shipped last year.
And nothing is wasted. Stones that fail Brown’s checks become ornaments for the home or garden, scrap pieces of granite are turned into bottle stops, cheese boards and coasters. And on my visit, Jim English and Paul Davidson were in the office upstairs plotting Kays’ next venture, whisky. It looked like fun.
In fact, the whole operation, from Ailsa Craig to the Olympics, looked like fun.