Rhona Martin
| Rhona Martin | |||||||||||||
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| Curler | |||||||||||||
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| Born |
12 October 1966 Dunlop, Ayrshire,Scotland |
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| Career | |||||||||||||
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World Championship appearances |
1 (2000) | ||||||||||||
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European Championship appearances |
6 (1996, 1998, 1999, 2001, 2005, 2006) | ||||||||||||
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Olympic appearances |
2 (2002, 2006) | ||||||||||||
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Medal record
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Rhona Howie MBE (born 12 October 1966, Ayrshire), better known under her married name, Rhona Martin, is a British curler most famous for skipping the British women's team at the 2002 Winter Olympics, where the team claimed the gold medal. She has also skipped for Scotland at both the World and European Championships.
Martin was long known in Scottish curling circles for her uncanny knack of repeatedly failing to win the national championships at the final hurdle, but finally won the right to appear in a major international championship in 1998, where she was skip of the Scotland team that won a silver medal at the European Curling Championships. With some significant changes in personnel, she returned to the championships in Chamonix the following year, where the team was narrowly edged out of the medal placings.
In 2000, Martin's quartet won the Scottish Women's Curling Championship, defeating the team led by former Olympic skip Kirsty Hay in the final, and were therefore entitled to represent Scotland at the World Curling Championships, held that year in Glasgow. They performed well at the World Curling Championships, with a particular highlight of defeating the Canadian side skipped by Kelley Law in the round-robin stage of the competition. However, Law earned her revenge against Scotland in the semi-finals, leading Canada to a 10-6 win. Martin's team was disappointed after missing out on a medal by losing 10-5 to Dordi Nordby's Norwegian outfit in the subsequent play-off.
The fourth-place finish at the World Championships left the team well placed to secure its place as Great Britain's representatives at the Salt Lake City Olympics in 2002, selection for which was based on performances in the World and European Championships over the whole four-year Olympic cycle. Crucially, though, changes in the team's line-up meant that the European silver medal in 1998 was discounted, meaning that the team skipped by former world junior champion Julia Ewart, which represented Scotland at the 2001 World Championships in Lausanne, had the potential to be selected. Ewart recovered from a slow start to string together an extraordinary sequence of wins; a gold for Scotland would take Ewart and her teammates to the Olympics, and a silver would result in a special play-off to decide the selection. However, Scotland were derailed in the semi-final by Sweden, allowing Martin's team to represent Scotland in Salt Lake City.
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