Accustomed to living in the sporting shadows, curling — often disparaged by the uninitiated as the pensioners’ choice among winter sports — is experiencing rising global popularity, with a new generation of participants and television viewers in places as far removed from its cold-weather roots as Ivory Coast, Hawaii and Las Vegas.

Spearheading this rejuvenation are competitors like Muirhead, a four-time world junior curling champion who has also won junior championships in golf and bagpiping. Turning professional in curling meant turning down golf scholarships from several American colleges, a potentially costly choice in financial terms: Muirhead’s earnings this year on the world curling tour are listed as a meager $32,150.

In Stirling, her training — supported by an annual grant for living expenses from the sports institute — includes sessions with Misha Botting, a 46-year-old Russian-born sports psychologist, who is a Bolshoi-trained ballet dancer. In an interview, he described curling as equally demanding, in physical strength and mental toughness, as other, more popular athletic winter sports like skiing.

“Curling, now, is a sport for full-time professionals,” he said. “What Eve does really well is to sustain a very particular body shape, and that determines the consistency and precision with which she delivers the stone. Curling is a target sport, like golf, and the slide before the stone is released is very much like a swing. Eve works at that very hard.”

Officials of the World Curling Federation say theirs is the fastest growing of all winter sports, with 1.5 million active curlers worldwide. An estimated 1.2 million of those are in Canada, which has curling clubs in scores of cities and towns.

But the growth elsewhere — curling clubs in the United States estimate there are 16,000 American curlers — has been enough to mount a challenge to the traditional supremacy of countries like Canada, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland.