And on the fourth day of my Olympic adventure I went to see the Women’s Gold Medal Curling game. I have to preface this by saying that I thought it was a little dull most of the time. No wonder Canadians like it so much? Sorry, sorry, I’m just sore from their comeback against the U.S. in the Women’s Ice Hockey finals later that night. Dull or not, there was a lot to observe and learn from. Here are some of my observations.
Curling is the bar-game of Olympic sports. As such, even the best curlers in the world are pretty average looking when it comes to body type. It’s funny to imagine them living in the Olympic Village among the sex-crazed elite athletes trying to pick each other up constantly. The fans, perhaps mirroring their favorites, also seemed a little… perhaps decrepit? Maybe there are some conventions about staying quiet for the shots but even when there was cheering it was subdued and repetitive in nature.
One thing the curlers are absolutely elite at was communication. I think curling would be a great sport to use as a team-building activity. There’s one person who throws the stone, one who is standing near the target, and two sweepers. The two sweepers follow instructions without comment, primarily from the person standing near the target but also from the person who made the throw. There were a lot of screams of “Haaaaard” or “VERY HARD” and there was a visible difference between those two “settings.”
Curling, like Tennis, has alternating ends (games in tennis) when one team has a clear advantage over the other. In tennis, the player who is serving is expected to win the game. That’s called “holding” serve and losing a service game is called a “break.” In Curling the advantage comes from who goes first and who (therefore the other team) has the final shot. The team that has the final shot has the advantage and should earn at least a point. There were some ends like the sixth that went pretty much exactly the way you’d think it would go. The first team put a stone down, the second team knocked it off, repeat, repeat, repeat, until the last team to go took their final shot. This was exceedingly boring. But some of the ends were much more complicated with five or six stones on the board at once, creating interesting tactical and geometric conundrums.
Even sitting in the first row, I found myself looking at the big screen in the arena when there were multiple stones in play. It was showing the shot, familiar to TV, from directly above the target, looking down. Although you lose all sense that these are three dimensional objects, it really is the perfect view for insight into the tactics of the situation. It occurs to me that almost every sport is better live AND every sport is better on television. People have figured out, especially for sport like curling or speed skating that have very predictable movement, exactly where to put the cameras and how to move them to best convey the game to the viewer. You lose all that live, and while the atmosphere at the arena and the extra stuff you see during breaks or somewhere that would be offscreen is great, you often lose some sense of what is happening in the game itself.
Watching curling was interesting and I’m glad I went but it was the first of the sports I’ve seen here that didn’t make me want to join a league when I got home — Ice Hockey, yes, Speed Skating, yes, Curling? Not really. Today I’ll be watching some more Ice Hockey, this time Men’s. It’s the semi-finals: Sweden vs. Finland at 4:00 OT/7:00 ET and Canada vs. USA at 9:00 OT/Noon ET.
Go USA!