Martin sweeps aside year of trauma in gold quest

And yet much has changed since this 39-year-old from Ayrshire earned gold in Salt Lake City with the last delivery of the competition. While she enjoyed a post-Olympic whirl that brought outings to the Wimbledon royal box and a trip to Buckingham Palace for an MBE, she more recently revealed her last year has been traumatic. Following the collapse of her husband Keith's business, her marriage has broken down, and debt problems have obliged her to sell her home in Dunlop - the village she grew up in - and move with her two children into accommodation subsidised by social security. Hardly surprisingly, she has described 2005 as the worst year of her life.

On the ice, too, there have been profound alterations as the old system of picking the best team to represent Scotland - that is, Britain - at the Olympics has been replaced by a squad system pooling the most talented players available.

Thus the team that Martin skipped here yesterday - finally settled just over six weeks ago - contained two other hugely experienced skips in Kelly Wood, seven times a Scottish champion, and Jacqui Lockhart, whose team won the world title a few months after Martin and Co's Salt Lake triumph. It remained to be seen whether the old saying about too many chiefs and not enough Indians would hold sway.

Watched by an enthusiastic crowd of around 200 - Turin clearly regards ice as something on which you skate rather than slide - the new British combo opened their title defence against opponents who comprised Denmark's entire Olympic team at these Games.

The Scottish quartet emerged on the ice to the skirling accompaniment of the Claymore Pipes and Drums, played by a group who, somewhat bizarrely, come from Milan and are Italian with the exception of their Scottish Pipe Major and Meyer Emmanuel, who formed the group after being bequeathed a set of bagpipes by his Scottish grandmother.

The Britons' match - the first of nine they play in the round-robin qualifiers - was similarly confusing, but Martin ensured a 3-2 victory after a tight, tactical encounter. Martin conceded that the match had been " quite boring", but added: "A win's a win. Doesn't matter how you do it." Next up today are Switzerland, the 2002 silver medallists.

Earlier, Britain's men, skipped by a relaxed and smiling David Murdoch and watched by the Princess Royal, opened their campaign with a 7-5 victory over the hosts. "I'm happy because I've got a great team behind me," Murdoch said. His smile widened still further by the end of the day as his side beat New Zealand 10-5.

The defending men's champions, Norway, lost 11-5 to a US team making their first appearance at the Olympics. Effectively, Paal Trulsen's team were beaten by Minnesota, as their opponents come from two tiny towns in that vast northern state - Chisholm and Bemidji. The hobbies of team member Shawn Rojeski say plenty about the locale - fishing, hunting, boating, Hibbing. Actually, the last is the town that lies five minutes' drive away from his, which was where Bob Dylan was born.

The result was expansively celebrated by a group of family and friends, including one woman wearing a hat that resembled a giant curling stone. Back at the Chisholm curling club, the match had been watched live on TV as part of a breakfast party. Starting at 2am Minnesota time.