🥌 The Unburdened Heart: What a Curling Stone Taught Me About Letting Go

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Let me tell you something about systems.

Systems — whether they govern corporations, nations, or the inner architecture of an elite athlete’s mind — tend to demand perfection in exchange for belonging. They offer a transaction: give us everything, and we will give you a place at the table. Jennifer Jones, Canadian curling legend and the subject of our latest deep dive on Heliox, understood this transaction from childhood. She accepted it. She even mastered it. And then, after decades of being one of the most decorated women in the history of her sport, she did something the system never quite planned for.

Rock Star: My Life On and Off the Ice

Why This Olympic Sport Bothers Physicists

Jennifer Jones (curler) - Wikipedia

This is Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy

Independent, moderated, timely, deep, gentle, clinical, global, and community conversations about things that matter.  Breathe Easy, we go deep and lightly surface the big ideas.

Transcript

0:25

Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are sliding into a world that, quite frankly, I think a lot of us have a complicated relationship with.- Complicated how?- Well, you know how it is. Every four years, the Winter Olympics roll around, and suddenly we all become these temporary experts in this very specific, very strange activity, Oh, yeah. We're yelling at our televisions. We're critiquing the sweeping. We're talking about the hammer. Everyone knows what the hammer is for about two weeks. Exactly. But then for the next three years and 11 months, it just it sort of vanishes into the ether. It's this ghostly presence. It's the Brigadoon of sports. It appears from the mist, captivates everyone, and then just poof, gone. That's the perfect way to put it. But today we are not just waiting for the Olympics. We're tearing back the curtain on curling. And I have to say, looking at the stack of research you've brought in, I think my perception of it as just, you know, housework on ice is about to be shattered. Oh, completely. Look, on the surface, curling looks polite. It seems quiet. It seems deliberate. It involves brooms and cardigans. It does. But underneath that surface layer, which you actually have is a game of, well, violent physics. microscopic margins of error, and a level of psychological warfare that would make a professional poker player sweat through their shirt. Psychological warfare? Yeah. Really? In curling? Absolute psychological torture. I mean, it is often called chess on ice, but that almost undersells it. How so? Because chess pieces don't weigh 40 pounds and move based on the thermodynamics of friction. That's a fair point. And we are exploring this world through the lens of one singular figure. As the world starts to look toward the 2026 Winter Olympics, there is one name that looms larger than any other in the history of the women's game. Jennifer Jones. The icon. We're basing this deep dive primarily on her memoir, Rockstar, My Life on and Off the Ice, which she wrote with the journalist Bob Weeks. But we've also pulled a stack of technical breakdowns on curling physics. Some papers on sports psychology and even some geological surveys, which I promise we will get to. Right. Because the mission today isn't just to recount a biography. No. And honestly, if we just did a then she won this, then she won that episode, we'd be boring ourselves on the listener. The mission today is to look at the psychology of high performance. Okay. I mean, how does a painfully shy girl, someone who literally hid from people, transform into this ice-cold killer on the rink? And we're also going to get into the physics of this 20-kilogram granite stone that... quite literally defies scientific explanation. That part stood out to me in the prep. The fact that physicists are still arguing about why the rock moves the way it does, it seems like it should be a solved problem. You'd think so, but it's not. It is the central mystery of the game. Yeah. And it's actually the perfect metaphor for Jones herself. The curl. Exactly. In the game, the stone never travels in a straight line. It takes this arsing path that is... Well, it's hard to predict. Jones's life was exactly the same. She didn't go from child prodigy to champion in a straight line. She had to navigate law school, becoming a mother, being vilified by the national media and a career threatening injury. It was anything but a straight path. So to understand that arc, that curl, we have to start at the origin point. And for Jennifer Jones, that origin point is a basement in Winnipeg. The St. Vital Curling Club. Now, if you aren't Canadian or if you haven't spent time in the upper Midwest, you might not understand the specific sensory experience of a curling club. It's a whole vibe. It is. In the book, Jones describes this place not just as a sports venue, but as a sanctuary. It has a smell. A smell, like locker rooms, sweat. No, more specific. It's the smell of the ice, which has this crisp, almost metallic scent. It's the brine from the cooling pipes. It's the constant hum of the compressor plant in the background. Right. For a lot of people, that's just background noise. For Jennifer Jones, as a child, that was home. But she wasn't out there throwing rocks initially, right? She was hiding. She was escaping. Her parents, Larry and Carol, were avid curlers, so they'd drop her off at the daycare in the basement of the club. But Jones, who describes herself as painfully, almost pathologically shy as a child, she hated the daycare. She didn't want to interact with the other kids. Hated it. She found the chaos totally overwhelming, so she would sneak out. This is the image that stuck with me from the first chapter. You have this little girl sneaking up the stairs, finding a spot behind the glass, and just... Watching. Silent. Observing. It's such a crucial detail for an introvert. She wasn't an active participant. She was a student of the game before she ever threw a single rock. And she talks about trying other sports, which I found fascinating. It really highlights why curling was the one that stuck. It does. She tried baseball, but found the team was too big. Oh. She fell completely lost in the shuffle. And track and field. Too lonely. She said it was just you and the clock. There was no one to share the highs or lows with. And curling was the Goldilocks zone. Exactly. She calls it a big part of a small team. You have three other people, your squad, your sisters in arms. But when you are in the hack to throw that rock, it's all on you. It is entirely up to you. It satisfied her need for connection and her need for individual agency. It's a very specific psychological niche that it fills. I want to dig into the parents here, Larry and Carol, because in reading the book, they seem to represent two completely different pillars of her story. psyche, it almost feels like she was genetically engineered to be a curler based on their traits. Oh, that's a great way to put it. They really do represent the two halves of the coin. You have Larry, the dad. He was the technician. Right. He taught her the fundamentals when she was around 11. And it's worth noting, the way he taught her to slide, that flat-footed, stable slide, is still the gold standard today. He was obsessed with the line of delivery. Which is what exactly for those of us who aren't pros? It's the geometry of the throw. It's making sure your body, the broom you're aiming with, and the rock are all in perfect alignment before you even begin to move. It's the foundation. But here's the thing about Larry that stood out to me. He wasn't a tiger dad. Not at all. She didn't care if she won or lost. He just loved that she was playing. He taught her the joy of the game. He taught her that the game itself was the reward, not the trophy at the end. And then you have Carol, the mom. The oncology nurse. And I think we can't overstate how much that profession impacts a person's worldview. Oh, for sure. When you are dealing with cancer patients with life and death every single day, You don't sweat the small stuff. You don't worry about whether you look silly missing a shot. It puts it all in perspective. Jones writes that her mom taught her to seize the day, to be fearless, to just go for it. So you have this combination of technical precision from the father and this live life to the fullest, almost fearless attitude from the mother. Exactly. And that combination leads to this mantra that comes up again and again and again in the book. Why not me? Why not me? I wanted to ask about this because why not me usually sounds like whining, right? Like, why not me? Why didn't I get the promotion? Right. That's how most of us use it. We use it as this sort of plea to the universe. Why is this happening to me? It's passive. It's totally passive. It implies the world is doing something to you. But Jones, working with a sports psychologist named Cal Botterill, she flipped the script. She turned it into a statement of entitlement. And I mean that in the best possible way. Okay. When she was staring down a shot that had, say, a 10% chance of success, or facing a team that hadn't lost in two years, she trained her brain to ask..."Why shouldn't I be the one to make this? I've practiced thousands of hours I've put in the work. Why not me?" So instead of "Why is this burden on me?" it's "Why shouldn't I be the one to claim the prize?" Precisely. It shifts the entire narrative from victimhood to agency. It sounds so simple, but in the heat of competition, when your heart rate is 140 and millions of people are watching you, that mental switch is the difference between choking and winning a gold medal. But, and this is a key to the first act of her career, she didn't start with that mindset. She wasn't born with that armor. Not at all. She had to earn it through, well, trauma. The 1991 Junior Championships. This feels like the inciting incident of the movie. If you were writing the screenplay. It absolutely is. It's the moment everything changes. To set the scene for us. She's a teenager. She's skipping the Manitoba team. They're at the Canadian Juniors. Now, for context, for anyone listening outside of Canada, the Juniors isn't just some rec league tournament. This is televised nationally. It's a massive deal. A very big deal. And her team has crushed everyone all week. They go 10-1. They're the heavy favorites in the final against New Brunswick. And they lose. They lose. And look, losing is part of sports. Athletes lose every single day. But it's how she lost or rather how she reacted to the loss that matters here. The cameras are rolling. The cameras are absolutely rolling. And they capture Jennifer Jones, this teenage girl, just collapsing on the ice. Oh, wow. Sobbing. Uncontrollable. Heaving sobs. She's crying in the handshake line. She's crying on the podium while receiving the silver medal. She's just inconsolable. She writes about this with such visceral honesty in the book. She says when she got home and saw the footage and saw the photos in the newspaper, she felt physically sick. She did. But what's so interesting is that she wasn't ashamed of the crime because it looked... weak in some kind of machismo sense. She was ashamed because when she watched the tape, she saw a bad teammate. A bad teammate. How? She was just sad that they lost. Well, she realized that by making such a public spectacle of her own grief, she was sucking all the air out of the room. She wasn't supporting her team. She was forcing them to comfort her. She was making the loss entirely about her pain. That is an incredibly mature realization for a teenage to make I mean most adults don't have that level of self-awareness it triggered a vow a literal vow she promised herself in that moment that she would never ever cry publicly over a loss again and that vow created the persona we all came to know the stone face the stone face I remember watching her in the mid 2000s and you could not tell if she was winning by ten or losing She was just icy, unreadable. It was almost intimidating to watch. She was terrifying for opponents. But the book reveals that this wasn't just about hiding emotion to be polite or stoic. It was a strategic competitive decision. Walk me through the strategy of being emotionless. How does that help you win? Okay, so it goes back to the why not me mentality. If you are terrified of the pain of losing, if you are scared you're going to be that sobbing girl on the ice again, you play tight. What do you mean tight? Your muscles tense up, you start second guessing your weight on the stone, you play not to lose. Which is the kiss of death in a precision sport. Exactly. You cannot throw a 40 pound rock to a millimeter specific location if your arm is tense with By adopting this sewn face, she was essentially saying to herself, I accept whatever happens. fear. She created a buffer. A buffer between her performance and her emotions. Yeah. If she removed the fear of the emotional fallout, she could play free. She could play to win. So she builds this armor. She becomes this, like, curling machine. But at the same time, she is doing something that... frankly seems impossible by modern athletic standards. Yeah. She's living a double life. The Clark Kent dynamic. I think people outside of Canada or people who are new to the sport might not realize that for the vast majority of Jones's career, curling did not pay the bills. Not even close. There was no big sponsorship money in the 90s and early 2000s. These athletes had to have jobs. And she wasn't just working a side gig. She wasn't, you know, a barista part-time. She was a corporate lawyer. At major high-pressure firms, Aikens, then Willington West. She writes about the sheer grind of this. I mean, she talks about managing a McDonald's in high school just to save for a car. But then in law school, the schedule becomes truly insane. How insane are we talking? She would travel to Bonchspiel's curling tournaments on the weekend. And this the detail that killed me. While her teammates were watching movies or going to the bar to socialize, Jones would be in the hotel bathroom. Why the bathroom? Because it was the only place with a light where she could close the door and get some quiet. Wow. If she would be sitting in the empty bathtub with her heavy law textbooks, studying towards and contracts until 2 a.m., knowing she had to play a semifinal at 8 a.m. That just sounds miserable. I can't even imagine. It sounds absolutely exhausting. She talks about taking conference calls for multi-million dollar corporate mergers in the parking lot of the curling club, literally minutes before walking onto the ice to play for a national title. The modern narrative of sports is all about specialization. We're told that to be the goat, to be the Michael Jordan or the Serena Williams, you have to eat, sleep, and breathe the sport. 100%. If you have a distraction, you're not committed. She seems to be the total antithesis of that. She completely defines that logic. In fact, she argues the opposite. She believes the law career actually made her a better curler. How? Wouldn't the stress just be overwhelming, taking on both of those things? It forces compartmentalization. If she lost a big game on a Sunday, but she had a massive legal brief due Monday morning, she couldn't wallow. She didn't have the luxury of sitting around feeling sorry for herself. True. She had a client depending on her. It forced her to pivot her mind immediately. So it prevented the, like, obsession spiral that athletes can get into after a loss? Exactly. It kept her world big. And she had another mechanism for this, which I absolutely loved reading about. The $20 Club. Oh, tell me about The $20 Club. This sounded so wholesome in the book. It was her lifeline. It was a group of girlfriends who were not curlers. This is the key part. Okay. They met once a month. The rule was strictly enforced. You had to bring $20 and you had to spend it on something frivolous for yourself. A treat. So no groceries, no paying bills, no buying diapers. None of that. It was forced self-care. But the crucial part was that these women didn't know an intern from an outturn. They didn't care if Jennifer won the Scotties or crashed out in the first round. They just loved Jen. They loved Jen, not the Skip. And having that circle of people who don't care about your stats is incredibly grounding when the rest of the country is dissecting your stats. every move on national television. It reminded her that she was a person first and an athlete second. That's it. It provided that mental balance. I want to pivot here because we've talked a lot about the mental game, but we need to talk about the physical reality of what she was actually doing. We have this video source from Cleo Abram that breaks down the physics of curling and it... It honestly blew my mind. The science break. Let's do it. This is my favorite part. Okay, so the rock. It's not just any rock you can pick up. No. It is 20 kilograms, about 44 pounds, of very, very specific granite. And when I say specific, I mean every single curling stone used in the Olympics and World Championships comes from one tiny island off the coast of Scotland. One island? One island. It's called Ailsa Craig. It sounds like a location from Lord of the Rings or something. It looks like one. It's this uninhabited volcanic plug that just rises out of the ocean. It formed 60 million years ago. And the reason they use this specific granite, specifically the Blue Home granite from there, is all about its water absorption properties. Why does water absorption matter for a rock sliding on ice? Because ice is wet at a microscopic level. If a rock is too porous, water gets into the tiny cracks, freezes, expands, and eventually the rock cracks or shatters. Okay. If it's too dense, it doesn't slide right, it doesn't have the right feel. Ilsa Craig granite is the Goldilocks rock. It slides beautifully, but it's tough enough to smash into other rocks at high speed without shattering. But the real mystery is the movement, the curl. Cleo Abrams video points out that curling stones seem to defy the normal laws of physics. This is the mystery of the curl. Okay. And this is where it gets really weird. Yeah. Okay, so if you take a glass and slide it across a smooth table and you spin it clockwise, which way does it curl? Well, thinking about friction, it would curl to the left. Because the friction is higher on the leading edge, which pushes it opposite to the direction of the spin. Correct. That is how things work in the rest of the known universe. except in curling. Oh no. If you spin a curling stone clockwise, it curls right. It curls with the spin. It makes absolutely no sense why, how. Physicists have been arguing about this for a century. There isn't one settled answer, but there are two leading theories. The first one is the scratch theory. Okay, scratch theory. So the bottom of a curling stone isn't flat like a hockey puck. It's concave. It only touches the ice on a very narrow ring called the running band. Since that band is rough granite, the theory is that as it spins, it scratches the ice, creating these microscopic tracks diagonal scratches. And the back of the stone then catches those tracks and guides it in the direction of the spin. Like a train wheel catching a track. Exactly like that. Okay, that makes some intuitive sense. What's the other theory? The pivot theory. This one is a little different. It suggests that because there is more friction at the very front of that running band, it melts the ice slightly more right there, which reduces friction at the front. This causes the stone to tip forward ever so slightly, we're talking microns here, and pivot on that leading edge, which then pulls it into the turn. So it's either tripping over itself or tracking itself. Or a combination of both. But here is where the human element comes in. The sweeping. which looks like janitorial work, but has actually applied thermodynamics. I always thought they were just cleaning the ice in front of the rock, like getting little bits of dust out of the way. No, no, that's part of it. But the main thing is heat. They are heat managers. They are scrubbing the ice so vigorously that their friction momentarily heats it up. Ah. This melts the pebble, those little water droplets they spray on the ice before a game, and it creates a thin film of water. This creates an aquaplaning effect. So they are reducing friction to make the rock go further. Yes. A good sweeping team can drag a rock up to three meters further than it would naturally stop. Three meters. That's almost ten feet. Ten feet. That is the difference between a perfect shot right on the button and a complete disaster that's out of the house. And they can influence the curl too, right? Massively. If you sweep hard, you reduce the friction, the rock goes further and straighter. If you lay off the sweeping, there's more friction and the rock curls more. They're literally manipulating the laws of physics in real time. And this actually caused a massive scandal in the sport, didn't it? I remember hearing about Broomgate. Oh, Broomgate. This is in 2015. It sounds silly, but it nearly destroyed the integrity of the sport. Manufacturers started making broom heads with something called directional fabric."Put on Earth is directional fabric?" It meant the fabric was basically high-tech sandpaper. It was so abrasive that sweepers could literally steer the rock like a joystick. No way! Yes. They could make a rock curl again. against its natural rotation, they could make a rock stop on a dime. It threatened to break the game because it made the throw air almost irrelevant. Because you could just fix any bad shot with the sweeping. If you had a mediocre throw, but two amazing sweepers with a Franker broom, as they called them, you could never miss. So they had to regulate the equipment. They banned them almost immediately. But Jones's career spanned this entire technological shift. I mean, she went from using corn brooms, literally made of straw, to high-tech carbon fiber. And she had to adapt her game every step of the way. So we have the physics. We have the mental toughness she built. And in 2005, everything converges. The Scottie's tournament of hearts. This is the shot. If you are a Canadian at a certain age, you know exactly where you were when this happened. it's like the moon landing or the Henderson goal. Jones is playing for Manitoba. She's in the final, but she's in big trouble. So set the stakes for me. It's the final end of the championship. She is down on the scoreboard. She has one stone left to throw, the last rock of the game. If she misses, she loses. Okay. But the situation in the house, the target area, is a mess. It's cluttered. She doesn't have a clear path to the button, the center. So what does she have to do? What's the play? She has to play an in-off. She has to throw her rock at an opponent's stone that is sitting way outside the house, near the edge of the sheet of ice. So she's not even aiming at the target. Not directly. She has to hit that outside rock at a precise angle so that her shooter ricochets off it, travels sideways across the ice into the house, and lands on the button to count the winning point. It's a bank shot on ice with a 40-pound rock from 150 feet. And if she is off by a single millimeter on the angle or a fraction of a percent on the speed, she loses. If she hits it too thin, her rock rolls out. If she hits it too thick, it jams and doesn't go anywhere. The margin for error is basically zero. She throws it. She lets it go. The crowd goes completely silent. The sweepers are screaming at the rock. The rock hits the outside stone. crack it careens inward it's tracking it's tracking and it stops dead on the button oh my god the place explodes with absolute bedlam voted the greatest shot in the history of curling that moment makes her a superstar she's on talk shows she's a household name across canada but superstardom has a cost the narrative starts to shift she goes from being the hero to being the villain this is the dark middle chapter of her career Once you are the queen, people start looking for cracks in the armor. And the big controversy came in 2010. What happened? Jones cut her longtime teammate, her third, Kathy Overton Clapham. Kathy O. A legend in her own right. A total legend. They had won championships together. They were friends. But Jones felt the team had plateaued. And she's absolutely right. Tell me. Male skips cut players all the time. In the men's game, it's framed as business. It's he's doing what it takes to win. It's seen as strong leadership. He's a killer. Right. It's a positive trait. But when a woman does it, especially to another woman, a friend, It's framed as a moral failing. It's a betrayal of sisterhood. It's catty or cold. Like she's supposed to prioritize feelings over winning. Exactly. We demand that our female athletes be nice. We want them to be killers on the field, but nurturers in the locker room. And Jennifer Jones refused to play that game. She treated the team like a business that needed to succeed. That must have been incredibly isolating. To be the best in the world, but to be hated for the decisions that got you there. It was. She talks about the loneliness of leadership. But this is where the lawyer and the introvert intersected. She absorbed the emotional hit privately. She realized that leadership sometimes means being the bad guy. She prioritized the Olympic dream over being liked. And that gamble paid off, but not before she hit absolute rock bottom 2012. The year of the perfect storm, Jones blows out her knee. I mean, a catastrophic injury. She needs major reconstruction. of surgery. Yeah. And at the exact same time, she finds out she is pregnant with her first daughter, Isabella. And the Olympic trials, the very event she cut Cathy O to prepare for, are one year away. It's an impossible timeline. She has to rehab a knee from scratch, birth a child, and get back to world-class form in just 12 months. Everyone wrote her off. This leads to the final evolution of her psychology. We went from the shy girl to the stone face, and now we get the unburdened heart. This is profound. After Isabella was born, something fundamental shifted in her. She writes about looking at her daughter and having this epiphany. She doesn't care if I win or lose. She loves me because I'm mom. It broke the perfectionism loop. Completely. For years, Jennifer Jones carried the weight of the country, the media, the sponsors. She felt she had to win to justify her existence, to make all the sacrifices worthwhile. And suddenly... Suddenly, her center of gravity shifted from the curling rink to her child. She realized her worth as a human being was no longer tied to the scoreboard. And the irony is, by caring less about the result, she played better. She played free. This is the unburdened heart. She wasn't suppressing fear anymore with the stone face. The fear was just gone. She realized that curling was just a game. A game she loved deeply, but just a game. Which brings us to Sochi 2014. The pinnacle. There has never been a performance like this in the history of the sport, men's or women's. Jennifer Jones and her team go to the Olympics. The pressure is immense. Canada expects gold, and they just run the table. 11-0, undefeated. First female skip to ever do it. And it wasn't just that they won, it was how they won. They were clinically perfect. Jones describes being in the zone for two straight weeks. Everything slowed down. The stone face wasn't a mask anymore. It was a state of genuine calm. They come home to Winnipeg and the city has gone mad. They renamed the street Jennifer Jones Way. There's a giant mural of the team. She has achieved everything. The gold medal, the perfect record, the lawyer is a champion. Most people retire right there. You drop the mic, you go out on top, there's nothing left to prove. But she didn't. She played for another 10 years. Because she loved the game. And I want to touch on the culture of the game here because I think it explains why she stayed. Curling is... well, it's weirdly nice. It is. I was writing about the spirit of curling in the notes. We saw in the research that players call their own fouls. Yes. It is a fundamental principle of the sport. If you burn a rock, which means you accidentally touch it with your broom while sweeping, you have to announce it immediately and pull the rock from play. Even if the ref didn't see it. Even if the ref didn't see it. Even if the TV cameras missed it. Even if the final rock of the gold medal game... It is a sport built on a foundation of total honor. Can you imagine that in soccer? A player saying, oh, sorry, ref, I actually tripped him. Penalty kick for them. It would never happen. And then there's the drinking. The broom stacking. Yes. The tradition is that after the game, the winners buy the losers a round of drinks. You sit at a table in the club, you stack your brooms in the corner, and you just talk. Not about the game, just about life. And Jones fully participated in this. There was a detail in the book that just blew my mind. She talks about her greatest rivals babysitting her kids. Yes. Anna Hasselborg, the Swedish skip, who is a fierce rival and Olympic champion herself, would volunteer to hold Jones' toddler while Jones was on the ice playing against a different team. That is just mind-boggling. Here, hold my child while I go try to destroy your Olympic dream. It's the paradox of curling. On the ice, it's war. Off the ice, it's a village. And Jones, the introvert, found a way to navigate that. She talks about the patch, the big party tented events. She learned to let her guard down, to let the fans in. Her late career was really interesting because she sort of shifted into a mentorship relationship. The Jedi Master Phase, yeah. Yeah. In her final run, she joined a team of kids, the Zacharias Burgess team. These girls were literally half her age. Why do that? She wanted to pass the torch. She showed them the work ethic, the why not me mentality. She was tough on them, but she was building the next generation of champions. And it all culminates in 2024, her final Scotties tournament. The script is just perfectly written for her to win one last time and right off into the sunset. She's in the final against Rachel Holman, who is the new dominant force in the sport. And it comes down to the last shot. Jones has the hammer. She has the last rock. She needs a difficult shot to win the championship. She misses. by centimeters. Oof. That's brutal. It is. But look at the difference. In 1991, as a teenager, she collapsed in shame. She felt worthless. In 2024, she missed the shot to win her final championship. And she smiled. She smiled. She smiled. A genuine, peaceful smile. The crowd gave her a standing ovation that lasted for several minutes. Her opponents were crying for her, and her daughters ran onto the ice. That image of the daughters running to her. They were begging her not to quit. Mom, please play one more year. Don't stop. But she knew it was time. She said she just wanted to smell the ice one last time. She looked around the arena, took a deep breath, and realized that just being there in that moment was the victory. The result didn't define her anymore. She had the unburdened heart. That is such a powerful arc, from the little girl hiding in the basement to the woman standing at center ice. totally at peace with imperfection. It really is. Full circle. So as we look toward the 2026 Olympics, what is the legacy here? What did Jennifer Jones actually change about the sport of curling? She changed the geometry of the game. Before Jones, women's curling was often very defensive. It was a draw game, you know, sliding rocks gently into position, trying not to make a mistake. A bit passive. Very. Jones came in with the big weight, She threw hard hits like the men did. She wasn't afraid to peel rocks out of play to open up the house. She made the game aggressive, high precision, and fearless. She turned it from a defensive struggle into a shootout. Exactly. She made it rock star curling. She did. But I think more than the tactics. Her legacy is the proof of concept. In a world obsessed with specialization and the grind, she proved that you don't have to choose. You can be a high-powered lawyer, a present mother, and an Olympic champion all at the same time. You don't have to sacrifice your humanity to be a winner. You just need the right granite, a good broom, and an unburdened heart. And maybe the bathtub to study in. And a very good bathtub. The book is Rockstar, My Life on and Off the Ice. Whether you know a hog line from a hammer or not, it's a really fascinating look at the cost and the joy of excellence. Go smell the ice. Thanks for diving in with us. We'll see you next time.