Culture Blues

Olympic Hangover: Curling

There’s nothing like turning on a 5-5 game in the eighth end, with one team laying two, and the other team’s skip sending the hammer on its way to the house.

Oh, excuse me. I watched a lot of curling during the Olympics. But that’s truly what went through my mind when I popped on the TV two weeks ago. Curling epitomizes the Winter Olympic appeal. We all tune in nightly to events and sports we never see anywhere else. A guy laying flat on a board zipping along at 90mph on a sheet of ice. A girl with skis on her feet and a gun in her hand. The entertainment is predicated on shock value or utter confusion. You’re determined first to spend a couple of sittings understanding what the fuck you're looking at, then you begin the process of enjoyment.

Ski jumping and luge, for instance, use speed and flashy moves to catch your attention. But during this year's Olympics, I discovered curling—a sport that’s really so much more than a punch line that's only relevant for two weeks out of every four years. Go beyond a perfunctory look at it and you’ll find a competitive game that requires a balanced combination of skill, execution, and strategy, as all sports do.

The three-moves-ahead thinking process recalls the mental intensity of a chess match. And while the competition is all about positioning and counter-positioning, these pieces don’t have the defined movement of a pawn or bishop. The possibilities are wide open once that curler glides forward and releases the stone.

Strategically, I’ve learned a bit about when someone might want to throw a guard and when one might want to throw a draw, landing the stone directly in the button, but I still feel fairly ignorant about the game. So any analysis I make should be mindful of this perspective. That said, curling seems to be missing an element so common among most sports: luck.

It appears to be a game all about control. Controlling the speed of the stone, controlling the line, controlling the curl and the movement with two team members furiously sweeping and pulling their brooms away at the appropriate moments. During the two weeks I spent fixated on the curling sheet, I never once heard the commentator attribute a bounce to good fortune. One team could get a good break, but always directly at the expense of the other’s imprecise execution.

While these intricate details of the game are part of its charm, we shan’t forget that the game has superficial beauty too. Midway through the Olympic fortnight, I texted a bunch of friends asking them if they’d been watching the curling, because, simply put, a lot of the women are cute as shit. Cupid struck me when I laid eyes on Melanie Robillard, who,  seems well aware of her sexiness. When I told my friend I thought she was a major C-Pie, he said he’d tap Eve Muirhead. While the women had a good natural look going, the men were making fashion statements.

Looks are one thing, voice is another. It’s hysterically funny to watch men and women shout “The weight’s good!” in German, Swedish and Japanese among other tongues, and that alone surely provided entertainment for those who didn’t bother to learn the game.

Hot girls and argyle pants aside, the curling broadcast had a human element that allows viewers to connect, and the commentators did a great job of building that up. Some participants are skinny, some chunky. Some are more vocal than others. They are teachers, market researchers, and law students. We got to know their backstories and on-ice personalities and we latched onto them. It’s the kind of connection the NHL has been trying to facilitate for years now between fan and athlete, but they’re often stymied by the speed of the game and the hockey player mindset of modesty and grit that translates to boring storylines—something Olympic producers simply won’t tolerate. Thus, Allison Pottinger and Debbie McCormick became household names.

But now that I have infiltrated the strange exterior of curling’s appearance, I’m saddened. How the hell am I going to get my fix? Almost everyday for two solid weeks I’ve parked myself in front of the tube and eagerly watched my huddled countrymen strategize and manipulate the obscurities of the game. It’s both hilarious and sad that, poof, it’s gone like a winter ghost. I don’t have any way of watching it and four years from now I’ll re-live the moment when I’m sitting in my comfy chair, reading the curling Wikipedia page to learn the rules all over again.

Or maybe not. Maybe there’ll be a scandal or two to keep it in the news. Maybe we’ll find out John Shuster shit the bed at the Olympics because he was battling a sex addiction. Maybe Debbie McCormick will come out and admit to performance enhancing drug use. Considering all this unlikely, I plan to take it into my own hands. My friends and I are taking lessons in the Fall and we plan to keep curling in our lives. We encourage you to find a nearby club off the U.S. Curling Association’s list and do the same if you got similar enjoyment from this obscure game.

Even if you didn’t learn much from curling this winter, it probably taught you that you can be an Olympic athlete while you’re overweight and in your 40s. It may not be too late for your name to resonate in households. If you’re a freelance writer who learns how to throw a mean run back, you could be there in 2014 whether you’re hot or not.

Tagged as: curling, sports fix, winter olympics