Well hell’s bells, who knew the ice could get so hot? The Olympic curling community is still all in a twist about everything that’s gone on in the sport since a row broke out between the Sweden and Canada sides on Friday. “The whole spirit of curling is dead,” Canada’s Marc Kennedy said on Monday night after his team’s 8-2 victory against Czech Republic, which felt like a bold take coming from the man who started this entire farrago by repeatedly telling his Swedish opponent Oskar Eriksson to “fuck off” after Eriksson accused him of making an illegal double‑touch.
On Tuesday, the Canadians were outplaying the British. They beat them handily, 9-5, which means Bruce Mouat’s team have to beat the USA team and hope other results go their way if they’re going to make the semi-finals.
“Mouat gave us a couple of misses to work with,” Kennedy said. “Which isn’t something we’ve had from him before.” Then he left, grateful, he said, that he hadn’t had to face “a nuclear question”. There have been a lot of those in the past few days. On Tuesday morning there was talk that one of the Swedish journalists had new photographic evidence of the Canadian women’s skip making another double‑touch. There has never been a bonspiel quite like it.
The way the Canadians play it, curling is a sport where a competitor is supposed to take his opponent’s word. “This whole trying to catch people in the act of an infraction sucks,” Kennedy said on Monday. “We don’t look for infractions at grand slams. We don’t look for that kind of stuff on tour. We just trust that the people around us aren’t trying to cheat. If somebody does something out of hand, it just gets dealt with in the moment, and you move on, you don’t need the officials to manage our game. That’s where the spirit of curling is in a little bit of trouble, and, honestly, that’s probably come from the quest for medals.”
Curling, Kennedy says, is supposed to be a game for gentlemen. “It is what it is,” he said ruefully. “The sport is evolving.”
And how. The row has turned out to be the biggest thing to happen to it since it was brought back into the Olympic programme in 1998. The slow-motion footage of Kennedy brushing the stone with his forefinger has gone viral, and the internet is overflowing with sloppy AI skits of Kennedy nudging ice hockey pucks and knocking over figure skaters at the ice rink. On TikTok someone put together a spoof of Kennedy and Eriksson in a whole Heated Rivalry situation, which has pulled in 2.5 million views. It’s fair to say the organisers were caught short by the speed and size of the reaction.
They ended up bringing in two extra referees just to police the hog‑line, then took them away again after the curlers complained about it. “We’re not at some bonspiel in Saskatchewan, we’re at the Olympics,” the Canada team’s coach, Paul Webster, said. “We have untrained people doing things they’ve never done before. I have a lot of respect for people who are here and volunteering their time, but I think we really have to question if we’re doing new things at the Olympic Games.”
Whatever has been lost, some of the curlers acknowledge that something has been gained too, though no one is sure whether it’s for the better or not. The sport couldn’t buy this publicity if it tried. The Curling Group are launching a new international franchise competition called The Rock League next April, Mouat and a bunch of the others have already signed up to play in it.
“There’s been a lot of talk about the negativity of everything that’s going on,” the Canadian skip, Brad Jacobs, said. “But when you actually look at everything that’s gone on, and you consider how many eyeballs turned to curling over the last 72 hours, it’s probably the best thing ever for our sport.
“What does the world feed off nowadays? Negativity. But that’s OK. Like I said, all of that negativity brought a lot of eyeballs to the sport of curling that maybe have never even considered looking at it before.” The pity is that unless Great Britain get lucky it won’t be Mouat they are watching, even though he is widely regarded as the best player in the sport today.
