As the second week of the Winter Olympics in Sochi takes off, there’s been lots of talk about favorite sports, dramatic moments and absolutely heartbreaking interviews (read: Bode Miller and the disastrous Cristin Cooper interview, something I’m still upset about). But one of the most divisive Olympic events is a bit unexpected, and that’s curling. People tend to either love or hate it, and thankfully, I count myself among the former.
I don’t know what it is about curling, but I just love it. I’ve recently been converted to a curling-lover with the dawn of these Olympics, and I’m hooked. Yes, I’m being serious. I spent the larger part of last weekend desperately attempting to understand the language and how on earth the sport was even scored. Round robin play? Button? Bonspiel? Come around? Guard? Swingy ice? Huh? I needed the latest edition of Rosetta Stone CDs to understand what was going on at first. It’s got the most obscure language I’ve ever heard. My initial reaction went something like this: What? You mean it’s not just a giant game that combines darts, billiards and really slippery ice?
Turns out, it’s not. Apparently screaming, “SWEEP!” is the skip’s way of giving directions to the rest of the rink: how hard to sweep the ice to curl the stone to hit the opposing rink’s stones out of the house. A bit of translation for all you people who don’t know what I’m saying: the skip is the rink member who releases the stone into play, the house is the giant target looking thing in the center of the ice, and ‘rink’ is just a fancy word for team. The center of that is called the button, and when you hit a stone into the button, jackpot.
The ultimate goal is fairly simple, actually — get more of your stones in the house than your opponents. Simple, right?
Ha. Ha, ha. Not even close.
There’s a ton of strategizing that goes into where and how the skip releases the stone, how hard to sweep the ice (and when to stop) and how to hit the other team’s stones at just the right angle. Because if you miss, your stone can bend wildly out of the house, their’s might remain in, or worse, you can just flat out miss the shot, which isn’t good. And at the end of an end (yes, that’s what each round called), the team with the most stones closest to the center of the button gets a point. There are 10 ends in curling that work similar to innings in baseball: teams alternate between throwing a stone, and the team with the last stone throw, called the hammer, has the advantage to win the game.
After learning the lingo, I felt like I had been initiated into some kind of secret curling club. I was in! I know what’s going on! Finally! And thus, I became a convert.
Everyone should watch it, because the newly termed “cult” sport is oddly fascinating and very intense. I will never understand how things are scored in slopestyle skiing or ice dancing, but curling, curling I’ve got.
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