Scottish curler Bruce Mouat reveals experience of coming out and why one needs a burner phone during the Winter Olympics

Bruce Mouat doesn’t like to remember how it felt to miss out on curling gold by the narrowest possible margin at the Winter Olympics four years ago. Deadlocked against Sweden after three hours, amid unbearable tension, the men’s team final went to sudden death – only for Great Britain to be edged out.

For the skip (captain) of the men’s quartet, the sting of defeat – despite coming away with a silver medal – was enduring. “Until we competed again seven months later, I dwelt on the fact we didn’t win it,” says Mouat, curled up in a chair at home in the town of Bannockburn near Stirling. “It was so bitterly disappointing.”

Yet Mouat’s rink, as a skip’s team is called in curling (where players slide 18kg granite stones on the ice), found the way to motivate themselves once more. “I tell kids in my sport not to be scared of the losses, because you learn much more from them than the wins,” he says.

Then he grins on hearing the motto of tennis world number one Carlos Alcaraz: “I don’t win or I lose; I win or I learn.” “Ooh, that’s good,” smiles the Scot. “I might steal it.”

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Mouat, 31, goes into the 2026 Games vying for two golds. Now world champions, the line-up – Mouat, Grant Hardie, Bobby Lammie and Hammy McMillan – is unchanged from the Beijing defeat, the better to focus on gold in Milano Cortina. In the mixed doubles, he and Jen Dodds will repeat their Beijing partnership, where they finished fourth. It makes for a daunting 16-day schedule.

“We actually start the mixed two days before the Opening Ceremony, and go right through to the last day – it’s intense,” says Mouat, who spent a total of almost 40 hours on the ice in Beijing. “I slept for three days after the 2022 Olympics.”

Growing up in a Cairngorms village, Mouat was not steeped in curling. “No one in my family played it until my dad saw a newspaper article about a local club. I was too young to play then, but I went along to watch my older brother Colin until I could do it, too.”

Soon after he started playing, he was given a curling video game, which became foundational to his development. “I played it endlessly with my grandpa, sitting on his lap at our cottage in Nethy Bridge. I drove him and my dad mental with it. At that age, about eight, on the actual rink I wasn’t strong enough to execute the shots – but I could in the video game, and it taught me about strategy and how to win.”

Both on and off the ice, every detail matters, even restricting himself to using a burner phone throughout the Games, rather than his own mobile. “It’s to shield us from social media, put the blinkers on to avoid the negative comments you don’t want to see,” he says. “We have to look after ourselves physically and mentally.”

Emotions have an impact. Mouat has been with his partner Craig Kyle for almost five years. Having come out to family, team-mates and friends when he was 19, he began to speak openly in public about his personal life just before the 2022 Games. “Coming out made not only my personal life but my sporting life so much better,” he says. “Previously it was about my own fear. It’s hard for me even to think back to that time, it was so scary.

“I had built it up to be so extreme that it would impact how all my friends and family saw me. I felt unable to be myself around my team-mates. When you’re 17 or 18, all your friends are talking about girls. I couldn’t relate and was very conscious of what I was saying all the time. I didn’t know anyone in my sport who was gay.

“But as soon as I came out, I could just relax, not feel like I was walking on eggshells to make sure I didn’t give myself away. It was such a relief – and from there my team had a long string of significant victories. There’s a very close connection.”

The Olympic schedule means that, much as he would “love to see every single other sport” in Milano Cortina, he probably won’t be able to go to any of them, or the Opening Ceremony. Still, if he can surpass his Beijing silver, then he might well repeat the honour accorded to him four years ago when he carried the flag for Team GB at the Closing Ceremony. “To do it with my friends, family and Craig watching,” he says, “that would be great.”

Men’s curling round robin starts on day 5 (final day 15) of the Winter Olympics.

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