Curling up with some good sports

Another entry in our con­tin­u­ing cov­er­age of the Win­ter Olympics from Torino. I am a curl­ing con­vert. Dur­ing the 2002 games in Salt Lake I didn’t really get to watch any curl­ing. I thought, intel­lec­tu­ally, that I might like it, but never got around to it.

This year I set TiVo to curl­ing, and I haven’t looked back.

The sport (you know, shuf­fle­board on ice with 42-lb. rocks) is delight­fully slow, intri­cate, and human. A lot like base­ball, which I love for those same rea­sons. I much pre­fer watch­ing base­ball live though, and I won­der if I wouldn’t like curl­ing even bet­ter that way, too.

I’ve only watched women’s curl­ing (TiVo is tap­ing some men’s stuff today, I think), so I am inter­ested to see what I think of the (more) macho ver­sion. One of the things I like best about the women’s curl­ing I’ve watched is the inter­ac­tion among the play­ers. NBC has them all fit­ted with micro­phones, so you can hear them dis­cussing strat­egy, or com­mis­er­at­ing after fail­ure (the Amer­i­cans are so nice and grace­ful in defeat). I sus­pect it is a girl thing, like how watch­ing girls play soc­cer is a more life-affirming endeavor than watch­ing boys ultra-compete.

Notes from the audio track: Finnish is a weird lan­guage. There’s a lot of shout­ing (of instruc­tions) dur­ing this game. The unique vocab­u­lary of curl­ing is delight­ful. And all the Minnesota/North Dakota accents are fun(ny).

The women’s semi­fi­nals start today, too, I think. I encour­age you to take a gander.