On The Games: Curling, A Sport That’s All in Your Head

The Wall Street Journal
February 16, 2006

By Stefan Fatsis

Pinerolo, Italy—Watching the Winter Olympics, you take a lot on faith. That snowboard trick was better than this one? Sure. The biathlete missed a target the size of an aspirin? OK. The figure skater did a double toe loop instead of a triple? Whatever you say.

Curling might be the quintessence of Olympic befuddlement. The athletes don’t perform aerobic or muscular feats. They play a game that isn’t especially exciting to watch, the purpose of which is pretty much a mystery.

And how’s this for an advertisement? “It’s like chess on ice,” Roy Sinclair, president of the World Curling Federation, said yesterday at the Pinerolo Palaghiaccio, a cozy, 2,000-seat converted ice rink about 20 miles from Turin.

After 64 years out in the Olympic cold — or in the cold, but more on that later — curling was admitted in 1998. Inexplicably, it was a cable TV hit in the U.S. four years ago. Two NBC networks are showing about 70 hours of it this time; the audience for the first three-hour block was 10 times as large as for regular programming. Yesterday, two princes (Haakon of Norway and Frederik of Denmark) and a former king (ex-International Olympic Committee president Juan Antonio Samaranch) showed up to watch.

A quick primer. Four players per team compete on a sheet of pebbly, frozen deionized water 146 feet long and 15 feet, 7 inches wide. They take turns pushing smooth, round, 42-pound, granite stones with handles toward a four-ring bull’s-eye known as the house. Two players in special shoes slide in front of the rock, brushing furiously to warm and buff the ice, creating friction to make the stone move farther and straighter. (Sweeping can add 10 to 12 feet in distance.) Or they ignore the stone and let it literally curl.

The goal is to get the rock or rocks closest to the center of the house — the button — with points awarded accordingly. A set of eight throws per team constitutes an “end,” like a baseball inning. Ten ends make a game. Games take awhile, 2 1/2 to 3 hours.

I like having curling in the Olympics because it’s the antithesis of the demographics-driven, thrills-making sports that have been added to what the IOC grandiosely calls “the programme.” Just check out the jocks. “I was too short for basketball. I tried skating and I couldn’t do that either,” says Joe Polo, a 23-year-old student who’s on the U.S. team.

Curling is physical — balance, coordination, paroxysmal synchronized sweeping. But its virtue is that it is the rare brain game in the Games. Curling is about board position, geometry, strategy and communication; the U.S. team employs a system of numbered voice signals to relay speed and direction from one end of the sheet to the other.

I wouldn’t make “Chess on Ice” the centerpiece of a marketing campaign. But the big-money Olympics have done right by including a merchandising-transcending mind game, which, by the way, generates box scores’ of stats. “It’s a great mental drain,” says U.S. men’s team alternate Scott Baird, a 54-year-old insurance agent.

Curling’s precision is as evident above and below the ice as upon it. At the Palaghiaccio, the air temperature is kept at 10 degrees to 12 degrees Celsius. To prevent frost from forming on the ice, there’s no airflow within 15 feet of the surface. A Swedish curling official monitors the indoor weather conditions with the aid of a bank of computers.

For spectators, it’s cold inside. Bundled fans occupied nation-based sections in the rectangular arena. There were painted faces among the Japanese, funny hats on the Swiss, and flags, natch, among the mostly Minnesotans in the U.S. contingent. Curling songs were sung to the tunes of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” and “Winter Wonderland.”

Ten nations are participating in the men’s and the women’s tournaments. Yesterday afternoon, the U.S. women beat Denmark, 8-3, their first win after three losses in the nine-game round robin. Last night, the U.S. men lost to Italy, 6-5, squaring their record at two up and two down.

Both teams said the ice conditions were tough. By the end of the evening, the surface had gone “flat,” the American men said. Stones picked up minuscule bits of debris, making their movement less predictable. “We lost our pebble,” said 25-year-old John Shuster.

The women called their sheet fast. Their stones cruised and didn’t curl so much. High degree-of-difficulty shots like bending the rock to hide behind or whack another were tough to execute. “In Bemidji, the ice is quite a bit slower,” said Maureen Brunt, 23, who moved to the Northern Minnesota town last year to train with her teammates.

After their foursome qualified to represent the U.S. at the Olympics, Ms. Brunt and 21-year-old teammate Jessica Schultz got celebratory tattoos — curling stones and Olympic rings — just above their backsides. Yesterday, when they bent over to sweep or slide, the tattoos popped into view.