Colleen Jones, who won two world titles and six Canadian national championships in curling, one of the country’s most popular sports, and who also became a trailblazing television personality, died on Tuesday at her home in Maders Cove, Nova Scotia. She was 65.
The cause was complications of colon cancer, which Jones learned she had nearly three years ago, said her sister Monica Moriarty.
As a curling skip, or captain, Jones directed her teammates and devised strategies in a sport that is sometimes referred to as chess on ice. So adroit was she at gracefully sliding a granite stone weighing around 40 pounds with decisive precision that she was inducted into Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame in 2016 and named the second greatest athlete from Nova Scotia, behind only the hockey star Sidney Crosby, by the province’s sports hall of fame in 2017.
In 1986, she joined the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as the first female sports anchor in Halifax, Nova Scotia’s capital. Over her nearly 40 years with the network, she also worked as a reporter, commentator and weather presenter. In 2022, Jones was named a member of the Order of Canada, one of the country’s highest civilian honors.
“She is the best of what our sport is and can be,” Nolan Thiessen, the chief executive of Curling Canada, the sport’s national governing body, said in a statement after her death.
Although Jones never qualified to compete in the Olympics for Canada — the most decorated nation in curling, with six gold medals and 12 in total — she served as a commentator and analyst for nearly a dozen Winter and Summer Games for the CBC.
As a television personality, Jones was known for her effervescence, breezy style and infectious energy.
As an athlete, she was driven and innovative, training in a gym year-round when it was uncommon for curling and becoming one of the first curlers to employ a sports psychologist to help her overcome a fear of performing under pressure.
“I wasn’t going to win if there was a shred of doubt,” Devin Heroux, Jones’s co-host of “That Curling Show” on CBC, quoted her as saying in a tribute.
She meditated to reduce anxiety and maintained a diet that enhanced her endurance for matches that could last as long as three hours.
The night before important games, she watched the movie “Gladiator” to channel a sense of invincibility for her team, even bringing her own VHS machine in case the hotel didn’t have one, Mr. Heroux wrote.
Kim Kelly, a former teammate and her roommate at competitions, told the CBC that Jones went to sleep at a designated time and required total silence and darkness, stuffing towels beneath the door to keep out light. She fueled her excitement on the way to the arena by listening to Bruce Springsteen.
“She was quirky,” Kelly told the CBC. “I used to joke that every now and then that I thought about smothering her in her sleep. And her me, too. But we loved each other.”
Mary-Anne Arsenault, another former teammate, told The Chronicle Herald newspaper of Halifax that, as a friend, Jones would show up with “food and hugs.” As a competitor, she “had an intensity that was unmatched.”
“We would win a world championship and we’d be barely finishing our first glass of wine and she’d say, ‘We need to get better at this, we need to do this different and we need to call in this coach or this sports psychologist,’” Arsenault said with a chuckle.
“We were like, ‘OK, but can we celebrate for just a minute?’”
Colleen Patricia Jones was born on Dec. 16, 1959, in Halifax. Her father, Malachi C. Jones, was a justice of the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeal for Nova Scotia. Her mother, Anne Marie (MacDonald) Jones, managed the household for nine children in a curling family.
Colleen practiced her sliding technique on the kitchen floor by placing electrical tape on the bottom of a sneaker. She was permitted to join a local curling club at age 14. “It was just an automatic idea that I could do this,” she told The Canadian Press news agency in September.
She briefly attended Dalhousie University in Halifax and began her broadcasting career in radio in 1982, while also competing. That year, at 22, she became the youngest skip to win a Canadian national championship. Her most sustained success came between 2001 and 2004, when Jones and her teammates Kelly, Arsenault and Nancy Delahunt won two world titles and four consecutive national championships. Jones retired in 2023.
In addition to her sister Monica; Jones is survived by her husband, Scott Saunders, whom she married in 1984; her sons Luke and Zach Saunders; a grandson; her sisters Roseanne Williams, Barbara Jones-Gordon, Maureen Savoy, Sheila Zeyha, Jennifer Springstead and Stephanie Carne; and a brother, Stephen Jones.
“I think she was a person in the world that left a big footprint,” Kelly told reporters at Canada’s Olympic curling trials in Halifax, “but in curling, I don’t know if anyone will leave a bigger one.”
Jeré Longman is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk who writes the occasional sports-related story.
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