Men's Curling

Curling tends to be the butt of most anti-Winter Olympiad jokes, usually at the hands of Americans that just don't understand the sport.  Since 99.998% of the American viewing public doesn't understand curling, you hear a lot of jokes about curling every four years or so.  I don't think I'll be the guy that does much to reverse this trend.

I won't bother trying to explain the sport, except that it's exactly like Friday nights when I lived with my ex-wife: me coming home drunk and sliding down the hallway towards the bathroom, usually dropping and rolling a 40 oz beer down the hall while she frantically scrubbed the floor clean.

Although the sport is of Scottish origin (early matches featured huge chunks of frozen haggis instead of today's granite "stones"), Canada has established herself as the modern-day curling capital of the world.  Our gracious hosts are favored to bring home the curling gold in Vancouver this year, and they won't have far to travel with their medals since they're already at home.

Of course, the Americans will be lurking in the shadows, brooms in hand.  Since the floodgates opened near the end of the 20th century and curling was no longer restricted to amateurs, the US has made its presence known.  I took a look at today's match against the Germans.

The US curlers have a young, fresh, almost hip look (i.e. one of them has a goatee), while the Germans are pretty plain.  As the Mz said, "They look like janitors."  Cool or not, the Teutons dominated with lots of help from Andy "I Don't Need No Fucking Scrubbers" Lang, who seemed to just power the stone right down the middle every time.

The rules really are simple in curling, but it's damned hard to tell whether a team's delivery was good or bad.  I'll say things like, "Jeez, that was a terrible job by the Germans," only to watch them celebrating three seconds later.  It's also possible that I just don't understand the game at all.

Lots of funny things go on during a match.  After the curler delivers the stone (that sounds kinda disgusting, right?), he generally screams orders at the other guys with the brooms.  And I mean SCREAMS!!! (this part especially reminds me of my ex-wife)  The sport also features time outs, which seems sort of weird-- do they really need a break that badly?  They wear awesome shoes, too.

At least curling at Vancouver should be immune to the top plagues of this year's games: warm weather and accidental deaths.  Then again, those granite stones are pretty fucking heavy...