Thomas Ulsrud's Norwegian Team Is Disbanding After 12 Years Of Curling, 10 Years Of Outrageous Pants
The curling team with the pants. That’s all you have to say. The imagery is instant: four grown Scandinavian men and their provocative trousers. It’s quite an accomplishment, especially for a niche Olympic sport....
Jared Allen's Curling Team Of Ex-NFLers Is Starting From The Bottom And Aiming For The Olympics
It doesn’t happen with skeleton or short track speed skating, and definitely not ski jumping, because we all have families that love us. But we’ve all thought about it while watching Olympic curling: How hard can it be? The calculated walking. The histrionic screams. Pushing the rock, or whatever it...
Curling Team Banned From Alberta Tournament For Being So, So Drunk
Curling has long been billed as a sport that you can play while drinking. While that’s true, and it’s not unheard for recreational and competitive players to have a beer during a game, it’s definitely not true that you can play the game drunk, or at least play it well. That was proven in Alberta thi...
From John Shuster's Persistence To Rachel Homan's Disappointment, Every Olympic Curler Is On A Journey
Last November, my team played in a World Curling Tour event. Our team couldn’t be considered “competitive”—we play about one such event a year, whereas the good ones are looking at about a dozen weeks a year. We know what we’re doing; we’re just out of shape. Still, we finished 0-3 in our pool and o...
Everything You Need To Know About 2018 Olympic Men's Curling
Olympic men’s curling begins Wednesday morning (Tuesday evening in North America) with Team USA playing the host South Korea and defending gold medal-winner Canada vs. Italy at 7:05 p.m. ET. The top four teams after the 10-team round-robin will advance to a playoff. NBC Sports will be streaming ever...
Everything You Need To Know About 2018 Olympic Women's Curling
Olympic women’s curling begins Wednesday (extremely late Tuesday evening in North America) with Team USA playing Japan at 12:05 a.m. ET. Defending gold medal winner Canada’s first game will be against 2014 bronze medalists Great Britain at 6:05 a.m. ET. The top four teams after the 10-team round-rob...
Mixed Doubles Is Curling's Breezier, Equally Fun Version, And It Starts Tonight
Get jazzed: Curling will soon be on TV again in large amounts, the way the snow sports deities intended. For the 2018 Winter Olympics, there’s even more curling—not just because it’s great, but because a new variant has been added to the program, airing before the traditional four-person team curlin...
Olympic Curling Qualifier Gets Hamstrung By Politeness, Finishes With Insane Danish Shot
One of curling’s unusual features, other than everything else, has been its politeness and sportsmanship. The first page of the official rulebook discusses The Spirit of Curling for a reason, as it points out that players should be the first to admit if they broke a rule. (Imagine if NBA or NHL play...
Nina Roth And John Shuster Win Olympic Curling Spots In A Nailbiting Trials
USA Curling held their Olympic trials over the past weekend and officially have their teams for Pyeongchang in 2018. The women’s team will be led by Nina Roth alongside Tabitha Peterson, Aileen Geving, and Becca Hamilton, in the first Olympics for everyone on that team. On the men’s side, well, stra...
Canada Accidentally Forced Olympic Hopefuls Into Midnight Curling
Ah, tiebreaker scenarios: everyone’s favorite chaotic twist to a championship run. Baseball loved them so much, it went ahead and built it into the schedule. Yet some of the wildest tiebreaking calculus of the year occurred, out of all places, in the peaceful province of Prince Edward Island this...
Curling Tries Out Its Version Of The Three-Point Line
One of basketball’s prevailing properties has been its ability to adapt. At moments in its history when the game began to grow stale, from the shot clock to the three-point line and even illegal zone defense, rules changed to incentivize scoring as well as provide an opportunity to win through diffe...
55-Year-Old Curler Glenn Howard Could Represent Two Countries At The Same Olympics
Glenn Howard has been one of Canada’s top curlers for years, and the four-time world champion is again attempting to represent Canada in the 2018 Winter Olympics. The master strategist and his team, ranked 17th in the world and 11th in Canada, qualified for the opening round of the Canadian curling...
Russians Lure Curling Circuit To Siberian Mining Town
And you thought the NBA season was short. The competitive curling-circuit season typically runs from September to April, but officially, the 2017-18 season began over the weekend with what stands to be the largest purse, men’s or women’s, in any curling event. In Siberia....