EDMONTON, Canada — Jason Hills grew up in a rural hamlet in southern Alberta so small there have been no site visitors lights. Which wasn’t an issue as a result of there wasn’t any site visitors both.
However there was a curling rink.
“There was nothing else actually to do,” Hills stated. “So in the event you weren’t curling you’d go hang around on the curling rink. It’s a group factor. It’s like everybody will get collectively.”
In a lot of the world curling is a curiosity, a sport which, like luge or the biathlon, surfaces each 4 years on the Winter Olympics — as it should do in February in Cortina D’Ampezzo, Italy — then shortly fades from view.
Canada’s Tracy Fleury (R) releases the stone throughout a gold medal match towards Switzerland on the World Ladies’s Curling Championship in Uijeongbu on March 23.
(JUNG YEON-JE/AFP by way of Getty Photos)
In Canada, nevertheless, it’s as a lot part of the tradition as poutine and maple syrup.
Greater than 2.3 million folks — or certainly one of each 18 Canadians — take part within the sport yearly. That’s about 100 occasions the extent of participation within the U.S. And greater than 11 million Canadians watched the game on TV in 2024, in line with estimates from Curling Canada, the nationwide governing physique for the game.
“It’s simply embedded within the material of Canada,” stated Elaine Dagg-Jackson, an Olympic bronze medalist and now certainly one of Canada’s high curling coaches. “Canadians have an actual identification with what curling is and what it stands for. It’s a gracious sport the place persons are being well mannered. They shake fingers earlier than and after the sport.
“The curling rink was only a actually good place to be in Canada. And nonetheless is. It simply actually fits the tradition.”
The aims of the game are easy: Groups of two to 4 gamers slide 44-pound granite stones, also called rocks, down a slim 150-foot-long sheet of ice towards a goal space known as the home, aiming to get their stone closest to the middle of the home. One or two gamers from the throwing group use carbon-fiber brooms to brush the ice in entrance of the transferring stone, influencing its path and pace.
A spherical of play ends when every group has thrown eight stones; in Olympic curling, a match consists of 10 ends, eight in combined curling, with video games usually lasting two to a few hours.
The simplicity of the game is each its allure and its curse. As a result of there is no such thing as a operating, leaping or lifting of heavy objects, everybody from younger kids to octogenarians can, and do, compete in novice curling in Canada.
“It’s comparatively cheap and it’s comparatively accessible,” stated Heather Mair, an affiliate professor on the College of Waterloo. “It’s not a tough sport to play and have enjoyable at. It’s vastly entertaining. And you may actually play your complete life.
“I don’t know too many sports activities you might exit together with your grandfather and take part. It may be actually family-oriented as a sport.”
However whereas it seems simple, to excel on the highest ranges, the place millimeters separate winners from losers in competitions that may stretch for so long as seven hours over a number of days, the game requires shocking power, stamina, precision and agility.
Canada’s Brett Gallant curls the stone through the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing on Feb. 17, 2022.
(LILLIAN SUWANRUMPHA/AFP by way of Getty Photos)
“It positively takes a toll in your physique,” Rachel Homan, a three-time Canadian Olympian and three-time world champion, stated throughout a break in coaching on a brilliant Edmonton morning. “That a part of the sport is possibly ignored; the bodily toll it takes. It’s positively demanding.”
The curling occasions at February’s Winter Olympics shall be held on the Cortina Olympic Stadium in Cortina D’Ampezzo, certainly one of 4 occasion clusters in and round Milan. Canada, which has medaled in curling in each Olympics within the fashionable period, profitable a file six golds, will ship a dozen athletes — together with Homan, the reigning world champion — to Italy to compete within the males’s, girls’s and combined doubles.
The U.S., which has received two Olympic curling medals, each within the males’s competitors, may also have a dozen curlers in Italy competing in all three occasions. But when the game is a nationwide pastime in Canada, one which competes with hockey for followers and media consideration, it stays one thing of an oddity within the U.S., the place it attracts big TV audiences each 4 years through the Olympics, then fades from view till the following Winter Video games.
“It’s so irritating to see curling grow to be the following smartest thing to sliced bread for a month after which it comes off the radar for 4 years,” stated Korey Dropkin, a five-time U.S. champion and a 2023 world champion in combined doubles. “I need to see one thing that’s on nationwide tv within the U.S. each week. I need to have the ability to expose our superb sport to the U.S. viewers day in, day trip.
“I hope that within the close to future we’ll have the ability to create extra alternatives for publicity for curling.”
Curling was born in Scotland within the early sixteenth century however grew up centuries in a while the Canadian prairies, the place the extreme climate, rural panorama and tedium supplied fertile floor.
“In lots of components of the nation there’s lengthy, lengthy winters,” Dagg-Jackson stated. “The farmers could be busy all summer season, however within the winter they have been on the lookout for one thing to do. So the previous adage in Canada is you might go to any city in rural Canada and discover a grain elevator and a curling rink.”
Members of the Highland Curling Membership, fashioned in 1898, play on flooded sheets of ice on Jan. 11 in Inverness, Scotland.
(Jeff J Mitchell / Getty Photos)
The game, which predates hockey by a number of a long time, was delivered to Montreal by Scottish emigrants through the colonial interval, greater than a half-century earlier than Canada grew to become a rustic. It then moved west as settlers pushed into what would grow to be the central provinces, the place the sport was performed on ponds and lakes earlier than coming indoors.
In some ways the game and the tough situations by which it thrived embodied the standard values and traits — resilience, group, politeness, resourcefulness — which have come to outline Canada’s distinctive “northern character.”
Mair, the Waterloo professor, has studied the position curling performed in creating social and inter-generational connections and located the game might have been extra necessary from a psychological perspective than from a bodily one.
“I don’t know in the event you can admire what a Canadian winter is like, however something that will get us out of our houses and speaking to 1 one other is basically, actually necessary,” she stated. “We all know how vital it’s that we spend time socializing with each other, particularly at the hours of darkness winter days.”
Because of this, it shortly grew to become vastly fashionable, however for causes that went past sport. Most curling rinks, Mair stated, present social areas the place gamers can go to with the folks they’re competing towards.
“So that you’re sitting there for half an hour with folks that you just may by no means run into in another a part of your life and also you begin to construct social relationships,” she stated. “In actually small rural communities, these are fairly important. That’s form of the way it began.”
Aksarban Curling Membership president Steve Taylor demonstrates how one can push off the hack to ship a stone in entrance of an all-ages group studying in regards to the sport in Omaha, Neb., in 2018.
(Nati Harnik / Related Press)
It’s additionally why the flat lands of Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Alberta grew to become the earliest hotbeds of curling, which aligned effectively with the farming season. However the sport didn’t keep there. Curling golf equipment quickly sprung up on Military bases and in fishing communities, in massive cities and small cities, the place it was taught in faculties and performed in retirement houses. (Curling has taken a distinct path within the U.S., the place it has grow to be fashionable in nontraditional winter-sports areas comparable to North Carolina, Florida, Texas and the San Francisco Bay space.)
“There have been complete generations, for probably the most half, who actually had a way of the sport,” Mair stated. “The[re] have been plumbers and carpenters and lecturers, that they had common day jobs and but they have been these actually gifted athletes who would take the game to those elite ranges.
“So you might come from a teeny, tiny membership and also you may know somebody who’s taking part in within the nationwide championship.”
That romanticism impressed a radio play and novella by W.O. Mitchell, a author and broadcaster who chronicled life on the Canadian prairies within the mid twentieth century. In “The Black Bonspiel of Willie MacCrimmon,” which was additionally tailored for tv, a cobbler from a small city in rural Alberta strikes a cope with the satan to commerce his soul for curling success.
American John Shuster watches Matt Hamilton, middle, and Colin Hufman, left, sweep his throw throughout a match towards Canada on the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022.
(Brynn Anderson / Related Press)
However as curling moved from the prairies to the cities, the item classes the game taught modified as effectively. If Mitchell’s story is a decades-old tackle the timeless tug of conflict between good and evil, “The New Canadian Curling Membership,” a 2018 comedy by playwright Mark Crawford by which 4 immigrants present up for a learn-to-curl class, is a contemporary exploration of multiculturalism and acceptance.
What the immigrants share, nevertheless, is a perception that understanding Canada begins with understanding curling.
“It’s strange. And like all good issues, it takes a little bit time to understand,” Mair, who teaches within the division of recreation and leisure research at Waterloo, stated of the game. “At first look you’re not completely certain what’s happening. After which because the layers begin to form of unfold, you notice simply how attention-grabbing and sophisticated and fascinating it may be.
“It’s enjoyable. It truly is. It’s quirky and enjoyable. And I feel we want extra of that.”
However, she added, a lot of that has modified since curling entered the Olympics.
“We’re at a little bit of a crossroads,” she stated. “Elite sport is doing simply tremendous in lots of methods. [But] we have to have a distinct dialog about group sport. It’s not a couple of pathway to Olympic gold. It’s about rebuilding our communities and offering protected and accessible sports activities for all the pieces. And curling is simply so particular in that manner.”
Curling debuted within the Winter Video games in 1924 with simply three international locations participating; Nice Britain, which fielded a group of Scottish curlers, received the gold medal. However the sport didn’t return to the official Olympic program for one more 74 years and when it did, the publicity fueled curiosity in winter sports activities powerhouses comparable to China, Japan and South Korea, but additionally in Afghanistan, Andorra, Bolivia, the Virgin Islands, Kuwait and Mexico, that are all among the many 67 members of the World Curling Assn.
“There’s a little bit little bit of notion from America that curling is small potatoes. And it in all probability is in comparison with the large 4 sports activities,” stated Marc Kennedy, a world and Olympic champion from Canada who shall be competing in his fourth Olympics in Italy. “But it surely’s an enormous deal. Arguably one of many fastest-growing sports activities internationally. It’s large in Asia. A few of our hottest athletes are from Japan.”
That added competitiveness — 30 international locations tried to qualify for this 12 months’s Olympic match — has not solely raised the stakes and professionalized the game, it additionally threatens to crush curling’s gracious and well mannered traditions in a stampede for the highest of the medal podium. In final spring’s world championship in Canada, for instance, Chinese language athletes have been accused of touching a stone with a brush, kicking a stone and unlawful sweeping — all forbidden acts.
In most different sports activities, that might have been thought-about gamesmanship. In curling, the accusations alone have been an affront to the game’s custom and dignity.
Crew Shuster’s Chris Plys throws the rock through the U.S. Olympic curling group trials in Omaha, Neb., on Nov. 20, 2021.
(Rebecca S. Gratz / Related Press)
“In curling you at all times expose that you just broke a rule … and apologize,” stated Dagg-Jackson, the previous Olympian turned coach.
“It’s purported to be a gentleman’s sport. You’re purported to name your individual fouls,” added Chris Plys, a three-time U.S. Olympian. “Now we’re beginning to see folks doing questionable issues.
“It’s unhappy as a result of the most effective a part of the sport is simply how trustworthy all the pieces is. And there’s folks on the market 1766929110 which might be prepared to do no matter it takes to win.”
These athletes definitely aren’t dishonest for the cash since curlers, even on the highest degree, have usually needed to work common jobs to pay the payments. That would change this spring with the launch of the Rock League, the game’s first skilled competitors, which is able to start play shortly after the Milan-Cortina Olympics.
“The Rock League goes to be an enormous new chapter to the game,” stated Dropkin, the Olympian who will captain the U.S. Rock League group. “That’s going to current a complete lot of alternatives to curlers. Curlers now, curlers [in] the pipeline. They’ll really make a dwelling.”
The five-week circuit will characteristic six groups of 5 males and 5 girls — one from the Asian-Pacific, two from Canada, two from Europe and one representing the U.S. — taking part in a wide range of codecs throughout stops within the U.S. and Canada. Opponents won’t simply earn cash primarily based on efficiency, however will obtain salaries as effectively.
Traditionally the game has relied closely on prize cash, which doesn’t go far. Kennedy’s profitable five-man group on the 2025 Brier, the annual Canadian males’s championships, cut up $108,000 of the match’s $300,000 purse final March, which didn’t go away a lot after paying for journey and housing on the 10-day occasion.
The Dodgers pays Shohei Ohtani greater than that each time he involves the plate over the following 10 seasons.
“I don’t assume any of us get into curling with the concept of creating hundreds of thousands of {dollars},” stated Kennedy, 43, a father of two who bought his frozen-food franchise 14 years in the past to assist his curling profession. “You’ve acquired lots of curlers on the market that also play for the love of the sport and for the chance to symbolize Canada on the Olympics or World Championships.
“If cash was your motivation, you then’re in all probability within the fallacious sport.”
Rachel Homan throws a rock throughout Canadian Olympic curling trials in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, on Nov. 25.
(Darren Calabrese / Related Press)
For Homan, 36, a mom of three younger kids who has historically relied on sponsorships, stipends from the nationwide federation and winnings from underfunded excursions such because the Grand Slam of Curling to make ends meet, the Rock League has the potential to vary not solely her life, however her legacy as effectively.
“On this league, being part of it, may not imply something for me financially proper now. But it surely’s extra about what you’re abandoning and what you’re serving to create,” stated Homan, who will captain one of many league’s two Canadian groups.
Financing knowledgeable league isn’t the one problem curling will face popping out of the Milan-Cortina Video games, although. As a result of whereas the Olympics might assist the game collect viewers, it has executed little to reverse a gentle decline in participation on the grassroots degree, which is robbing the game of its future athletes.
“It’s simply onerous to get younger youngsters launched to it and have entry to it,” Kennedy stated. “Again within the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s it was the group middle. Everyone form of discovered curling, particularly out west. That’s what was driving an enormous a part of our sport for a very long time.”
Not any extra. Canada, just like the U.S., has seen hundreds of thousands of individuals flee rural areas for large cities over the past a number of a long time and consequently the native curling rink is not the civic hub it was when Jason Hills was rising up on the frigid plains of central Alberta. And what funding there may be within the sport is now being directed to occasions such because the Olympics, the Grand Slam of Curling or the fledgling Rock League, to not constructing extra group rinks.
“Curling needed to pivot a bit,” stated Dagg-Jackson, who takes her 5 grandchildren curling. “It was all about membership, in regards to the 1000’s and 1000’s of curlers throughout the nation. Now these few aggressive curlers that shine within the highlight are recognized to all Canadians as a result of they’re on tv on a regular basis and so they draw consideration to the game.
“Fifty years in the past you simply waited on the rink and other people confirmed up as a result of it was the place to be. Large occasions, Olympics, professional leagues, that’s the way forward for curling. However the tradition and the lore, the historical past of curling, it’ll at all times be there.”
