Hurry Hard: Actually, Curling Is Awesome

Admittedly, the trip would have had me well placed if war did break out. The 2018 Olympic Winter Games were held in Pyeongchang (the outdoor events) and Gangneung (the indoor events), South Korea, a couple of hours east of Seoul by car. Gangneung is just 70 miles from the border with North Korea, whose supreme leader, Kim Jong-un, battled President Trump in a Twitter war of words last year until realizing he could win over the credulous Western media with a “charm offensive” by sending his Bond-villain-worthy sister to what the South absurdly dubbed the “Peace Olympics.” It was Gangneung, whose arena hosted the curling match at which I saw history made, that ended up supplying the central mystery of this year’s Winter Games. No, not what happened to the North Korean cheerleader who mistakenly applauded for American ice skaters, but: Why would anyone need to dope to compete in curling? (Perhaps Russia supplies banned substances in all its athletes’ drinking water.)

Curling, after all, is the only winter Olympic sport that looks like something in which your grandpa could compete—if he could figure out how exactly it works. That’s the mysterious romance of curling, which makes it, every four years, simply irresistible to Americans.

Part of curling’s charm is that it might be the only sport left in the games that honors the original Olympic ideal of the amateur athlete. The Eastern bloc’s state-sponsored full-time “amateurs” during the Cold War, increasingly lucrative sponsorships, and the participation of, for example, the NHL’s professional hockey players all radically changed the character of the competition. But one doesn’t have to commit to eight-hour days in the gym to become an Olympian curler; strategy is more important than strength. The men of Team USA curling all have day jobs: John Shuster, the skip, and Tyler George are salesmen (for sporting goods and liquor, respectively and fittingly), Matt Hamilton is an R&D technician, and John Landsteiner is a corrosion engineer.

“What is a skip?” you might ask. Curling has a vocabulary all its own. Think of the skip as the team captain; this player is in charge of strategy and typically throws the final stone, also called a rock—which is made of granite from the small island of Ailsa Craig, just off the coast of Scotland. (Talk about mysterious and romantic!) The house is the area at the end of the ice sheet at which players aim their stones; the button is the bull’s-eye in its center. After one of the four players departs from the starting line—the hacks—and throws the rock, the skip calls out instructions for two other players to brush with a broom the area ahead of the stone, changing its path by changing the friction between stone and ice. Those instructions include such shouts as “Hard!” “Hurry!” “Hurry hard!” and “Die!” The delightful “bonspiel” is the term for a curling tournament.

You can see why Mr. T, the actor and former wrestler best known for the 1980s television series The A-Team, tweeted throughout the Pyeongchang Olympics with the hashtag #curlingiscoolfool. (“I predict PAIN for Sweden and victory for the USA! Yeah that’s what i’m talking about,” he wrote in one prescient tweet. “We’re in it to win it fool!”)

Curling, traditionally a competition of cold climates, is becoming a cross-continent craze. “It’s ridiculous,” laughed Australian Josh Saunders, who said he only agreed to accompany American Ashley Johnson to the Olympics when she agreed to catch some curling. The pair live in China and caught my eye with their costumes: Saunders had on a kangaroo suit, while Johnson was comfy in a Chicago Cubs onesie in the colors of Team USA. “It’s fun and addicting to watch. It draws you in,” Johnson said of curling. They planned to see a single curling match; they ended up going to three. “We’ve been learning it as we go along for the past two days.”

Thanks to their hosting duties, the Koreans learned it, too. “This is a new sport for us,” noted Sue, my South Korean guide on a trip to the demilitarized zone, as we watched the women’s gold match on the tour bus television set the next day. They were a quick study: This marked the first time the country competed in curling, and the women’s team took home the silver. “I thought it was funny,” Sue said of her first impressions of the sport. “It’s something you could play at home.”

Well, only if you’re from Scotland, where the game was invented some five centuries ago, or Canada, which has dominated since the game became an official Olympic sport in 1998. I was born in the latter and most of my ancestors hail from the former, so I looked forward to knitting my Canada 2018 hat, with curling stones surrounding the brim, as I watched my countrymen go for the gold. Imagine my surprise when I touched down in Seoul to discover that Canada, though it had won the gold in mixed doubles, hadn’t even placed in either the men’s or women’s tournaments. (You must realize that the country takes its curling seriously. After pictures spread of Shawn Germain double-fisting beers at 9 a.m. as he watched his wife, Rachel Homan, compete, he explained on Twitter that it was his way of dealing with the stress: “I’m not a drunk, I’m just Canadian.”)

My consolation prize, though, was an even more exciting game: I got to watch Team USA win its first-ever gold medal in curling. Hearing “The Star-Spangled Banner” play at the medal ceremony after the competition had me a little choked up. I recorded a video of the scene—complete with a huge crowd of Americans chanting “U-S-A!”—and uploaded it to social media to share the moment with my friends and family stateside. The games don’t value such enthusiastic promotion from fans, however: I soon received a Facebook notice informing me that “International Olympic Committee Rights Management blocked your video because it may contain content they own.”

So I didn’t bother capturing video highlights of the game that followed, the women’s bronze match, though it was every bit as boisterous. Japan defeated Great Britain, 5-3, with masterful moves and crazed calls from both teams. Most entertaining, however, were a couple of blokes in kilts who must have snuck in some of their nation’s eponymous whisky. They sang indistinguishably and yelled out, though to no avail, taunts like “You can run, but you can’t slide!” Curling might be romancing fans in every hemisphere, but its creators still have a lock on its distinctive trash talk.

Kelly Jane Torrance is deputy managing editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.