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Americans Go Mad for a Medieval Scottish Sport
Curling, with its boulders and broomsticks, is the butt of many a joke. But after the U.S. won Olympic bronze this winter, the sport caught on with the college crowd
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One Olympic sport not only bolstered the United States’ medal count this year (the men’s team took home its first ever – a bronze), but garnered enough popularity to triple CNBC’s ratings and crash the sport’s official U.S. Web site. It wasn’t snowboarding or figure skating. It wasn’t even speed skating, fueled by the trash-talking rivalry of teammates Shani Davis and Chad Hedrick.
It was curling, a game invented in Scotland in the 1500s.
“After the Olympics, it’s probably the ‘in’ sport in the country right now,” said Pete McCuen, president of the Ardsley Curling Club in Ardsley-on-Hudson, New York.
Teams of four hurl 42-pound slabs of granite across a sheet of ice, and use brooms to chase them toward a giant painted bullseye (“the house”). The team that gets the most stones closest to the house wins that round, or “end,” one of 10. In one telling, the game’s name derives from the fact that the stones tend to turn, or curl, when thrown. Another version argues that it came from “curr” or murmur, to mimic the sound of the stones connecting.
After curling’s Olympic success, young people have been turning up at local clubs in record numbers. Usually, 15 or 20 people would show up for the open houses Ardsley hosts to introduce people to the sport. But one weekend in March, over 250 visitors lined up outside in the 40-degree weather wearing warm clothes and rubber-soled shoes, waiting to tour the club’s facilities and have a shot at sliding a rock down one of its three sheets of artificial ice.
“Curlers aren’t so square after all,” said Don Torrey, a club member and retiree from Halifax, Canada.
Not at all. Students from several colleges around Ardsley have approached McCuen about starting curling leagues at their schools, or forming at team to join a club league. In tiny Triumph, Illinois, the Waltham Curling Club also experienced record-breaking attendance. About a third of the visitors to its February open house were students and twentysomethings who had driven down from colleges in northern Illinois, said member Rachel Puckett, who joined the club after watching Olympic curling four years ago.
Among the visitors was Concordia University senior Sarah Ross, who hates sports but loves watching the Olympics, partly, she says, because commentators clearly explain the rules of each game, and partly because of her interest in other cultures.
“I think just when we were watching it my friends and I decided it was something we could do,” Ross said. “I could probably luge, too, but I don’t want to die. So I decided that I wanted to be a curler, and my friends told me that was a good goal to have.”
Ross, who is studying English and biblical languages at Concordia on a full merit scholarship, and has applied to be a Peace Corps volunteer, started waking up at 7 a.m. every day to watch the coverage on CNBC. Some of her friends, she added, were up at 2 a.m. to watch the games live.
At the open house, she and a team of Concordia friends learned how to throw, or “deliver,” a stone. They even got to play part of a game against a group of firefighters, who were also curling for the first time. Stones slammed into walls and in every direction, and one firefighter slipped and fell face-first while sweeping and ended up with a bloody nose. Ross fared slightly better.
“The first several times I threw the stone I definitely fell over,” she said. “I got down into the basic position and then fell from a squatting position to a sitting position.”
But Ross picked herself up, tried again, and ended up entering her team in the National College Curling Tournament coming up this month at the Chicago Curling Club. Now she’s dreaming of moving to Minnesota, where curling is much more popular than in Illinois or New York, and where both this year’s U.S. Olympic teams trained.
She even thinks of competing in the next Olympics. “We’ll have to see how I do in the tournament,” she said, laughing.
Torrey attributes curling’s appeal partly to its social aspect – after a game, the winning team is expected to buy the losers a round of drinks by way of consolation, a tradition known as “broomstacking.”
“It’s very gentlemanly and ladylike,” he said. “We always start a game by shaking hands and saying, ‘Good curling.’”
Not to mention, it’s good exercise.
“You walk a couple miles up and down the ice, and you also sweep, which is a great upper body workout,” said Torrey.
Still, curling is a lot harder than it looks, as Ross learned firsthand at the open house.
“It looks easy on TV because those are Olympians,” she realized.
Americans flocked to local clubs after watching curling in the winter Olympics. Here, the U.S. women's team throws a stone.
Photo Courtesy of Dan Field, USA Curling