I have gotten my heart into olympic curling....its the grooviest and least sweaty sport....
from MSN....
SKATE AT YOUR OWN RISK. That’s the sign that greets you at the Broadmoor Curling Club in Colorado Springs, Colo. Though it’s hard to feel like your life is in jeopardy at a place where your hosts have put out a spread of Cheez-Its and Fudge Shoppe fudge sticks, I proceeded with caution in stepping onto the ice with other journalists assembled last October for the U.S. Olympic Team’s Media Summit. Once we were huddled together, Darrell Levitt, the club vice president, asked, “Who here has ever been curling?” Almost no one had. “Well, It’s not something you do with your hair,” he said, repeating a joke that must have been popularized when the Scots introduced curling … in the 16th century.
It was hard not to giggle, however, when we were escorted around half of the rink’s perimeter by a kilted man playing bagpipes. This little tour gave me an opportunity to inspect our surroundings more closely. Through the Plexiglass, I could make out a few goth teens snacking on Chick-fil-A and the entrance to a Ruby Tuesday’s. Let’s back up a bit: the Broadmoor Curling Club is in a shopping mall. Just across the parking lot is an Arby’s, an Advanced Auto Parts and, rounding out the trifecta, a warehouse with a big lit sign that says LIQUOR OUTLET. But the Chapel Hills Mall is not the club’s permanent residence. The club members and executives are searching out housing options, says the group’s Web site. But I don’t see why they’d want to move from a place so close to Ruby Tuesday’s patented “foodertainment” system.
After we reached the rink’s far side, Stu Baird, Broadmoor’s league coordinator, tutored us on how to “deliver” a stone, the stone being a 42-pound, circular slab of granite with a handle on top. For those of you curling at home: if you’re right-handed, crouch down and grip the stone’s handle with your right hand; it should be just in front of you, slightly off to the right. Balance yourself with a broom (bristles turned upward), whose handle should fit snugly under your left armpit. Position both feet in the starters (similar to the launch points you’d find on a track field), push off with your right foot, use your left food as a guide, glide, deliver stone.
I repeated this process three or four times, and should have known that I was doomed to fail from the beginning: the brooms we used were made by a company called Brownie.
Brownie did not do a heck of a job. I wobbled, my left foot glided less than it jerked and my delivery went all of about 10 feet, or 136 feet shorter than it needed to enter the “house.” See, with racquet sports, skills translate. If you can hit a tennis ball, you probably know how to go about hitting a shuttlecock. But there’s no other game that mimics curling’s motions; every aspect of delivering the stone felt foreign. So I tried sweeping, with Baird’s Law—“The one rule about sweeping is that you’re not allowed to bleed on the ice”—in the back of my head. After all, you’re on your feet, you make no deliveries and you use the broom for its God-given purpose. Effective sweeping can help a rock slide up to 15 more feet. Ineffective sweeping of the kind that I was doing is no help. Why did I have such subpar curling skills? (Why were my inner thighs so sore?)
As always, it’s all about the shoes. Curlers use “sliders” to help glide during delivery, and keep pace with the stone while sweeping. Sensing, perhaps, that I was about to stumble and bloody myself, Stu Baird lent me a slider. I slipped it over my left shoe. Suddenly, I was delivering pretty respectable stones—nothing house-worthy, but a vast improvement over my initial attempt. I’d have this whole curling thing mastered by last call at Ruby Tuesday’s. Which, it turned out, was only sort of wildly unrealistic. Jessica Schultz, a member of the women’s curling team, which has struggled in these Winter Games so far, told me that it took her only about a year to deliver stones with any reliability and another year to start understanding strategy. So, as our rink time wound down, I realized this: it only takes two years to become an Olympian, and I’ve got four until the next Winter Games. Sweet—plenty of time to snack on a few fudge sticks.
