Whatever Curling Is Gets Lots of Olympic Attention
Curling has several things working in its favor during the 2010 Winter Olympics. First and foremost, the Games are in Canada this year. Canadians love their curling. Second, the Canadian women’s team is getting crazy press because they’ve got a 5 ½ months-pregnant player on their team. And then there’s the matter of Norway’s pants. Those Norwegians have some crazy pants, and they’ve already proven that they aren’t embarrassed to wear them. They should be, but, in a sport that 90% of the world doesn’t even know exists, they are unafraid to let their collective freak flag fly. And, just in case the Americans were switching to reruns of Golden Girls whenever curling came on, Canada decided to call their ‘Skip’ (that’s Canadian for ‘Captain’) by the nickname ‘The Michael Jordan of Curling’. Yeah, Americans have all heard of him. That’ll get us to watch.
Do you need another reason to watch?
Does any of this add up to a wild American curiosity about something that more-or-less adds up to shuffleboard-on-ice?
Evidently so, because everyone is talking about it. Mostly, they’re saying, “I don’t think I really understand curling”, but they’re watching while they try to figure it out.
Curling is great for a whole bunch of reasons.
1. You can be really pregnant and still play, for example. It isn’t a contact sport. Some question whether or not it’s a sport at all. Kristie Moore, the famous pregnant Olympic curler, came under fire for being the ‘most pregnant woman to compete in the Olympics’. She and her boyfriend (actually, she’s been wearing an engagement ring for four years, but has made no plans to marry yet) decided to start a family before the possibility of playing in the Games came up. When she was asked to be an alternate on the team, they were totally unfazed when she told them of the baby on the way. Moore’s mother, a curler herself, was playing until a week before Kristie’s older brother Chad was born. That’s how curlers roll, you see.
2. You can be about 100 and still play. Since curling isn’t the most physically demanding of sports and lacks the kind of danger of skiing or snowboarding, players can play forever. The ‘Skip’ of the Canadian women’s team is 43-year-old Cheryl Bernard. The ‘Michael Jordan of curling’ is another 43-year-old Canadian, Kevin Martin, also known as “K-Mart” (I kid you not). He can, evidently, ‘release his rock’ and ‘talk it all the way to the house’. That’s how points are scored, with the ever-entertaining help of two teammates with “brooms” who furiously brush them on the ice to heat it and, thusly, help the “rock” towards its bullseye-like target.
3. With a “rock” consisting of 42 pounds of granite and a handle, it actually sounds like it might be strenuous to “throw” it.
4. You get to wear special shoes that enable you to both slide (if you’re ‘throwing’) or shuffle (if you’re “sweeping”).
5. Some of the “brooms” look just like brooms. Some look more like whiteboard erasers on the end of a stick. And they are personalized not only per team, but also by the individual player.
6. The sport was created 500 years ago in Scotland, when it got too cold to play golf, which leads us to:
7. Three words: Norwegian Curling Pants.
8. 90 minutes into the game, they stop to have a nosh. The Chinese women brought strawberries yesterday. The Swiss chose melon. Some make time for some nice hot tea.
Curling is the second most popular sport in Canada—after hockey, of course. And why shouldn’t it be (aside from the notion that most of us hadn’t heard of it until those crazy Norwegians took to the ice in red, white, and blue diamond-print pants)? One would think it would be popular with South Florida residents, many of whom wear loud trousers and funny hats to play the warm-weather version, called ‘shuffleboard’. The thing is, curling has been around for 500 years, and no one ever talked about it until the 2010 Winter Olympics. It was a secret that the Canadians have been keeping from its neighbors to the south all this time.
It would’ve been okay if they kept it a little bit longer.