How did curling become a Winter Olympics

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 a downside because there wasn’t any site visitors either.

But there was a curling rink.

“There was nothing else really to do,” Hills said. “So if you weren’t curling you’d go hang out at the curling rink. It’s a community thing. It’s like everyone gets together.”

In a lot of the world curling is a curiosity, a sport which, like luge or the biathlon, surfaces every 4 years at the Winter Olympics — as it is going to do in February in Cortina D’Ampezzo, Italy — then rapidly fades from view.

In Canada, however, it’s as a lot a half of the tradition as poutine and maple syrup.

More than 2.3 million people — or one of every 18 Canadians — take part in the game yearly. That’s about 100 instances the extent of participation in the U.S. And more than 11 million Canadians watched the game on TV in 2024, according to estimates from Curling Canada, the national governing physique for the game.

“It’s just embedded in the fabric of Canada,” said Elaine Dagg-Jackson, an Olympic bronze medalist and now one of Canada’s top curling coaches. “Canadians have a real identity with what curling is and what it stands for. It’s a gracious sport where people are being polite. They shake hands before and after the game.

“The curling rink was just a really good place to be in Canada. And still is. It just really suits the culture.”

The targets of the game are simple: Teams of two to 4 gamers slide 44-pound granite stones, also identified as rocks, down a slim 150-foot-long sheet of ice toward a goal space called the home, aiming to get their stone closest to the middle of the home. One or two gamers from the throwing crew use carbon-fiber brooms to sweep the ice in entrance of the shifting stone, influencing its path and pace.

A spherical of play ends when each crew has thrown eight stones; in Olympic curling, a match consists of 10 ends, eight in combined curling, with video games usually lasting two to three hours.

The simplicity of the game is both its appeal and its curse. Because there may be no working, leaping or lifting of heavy objects, everybody from younger kids to octogenarians can, and do, compete in newbie curling in Canada.

“It’s relatively inexpensive and it’s relatively accessible,” said Heather Mair, an affiliate professor at the University of Waterloo. “It’s not a hard sport to play and have fun at. It’s hugely entertaining. And you can really play your whole life.

“I don’t know too many sports you could go out with your grandfather and participate. It can be really family-oriented as a sport.”

But while it appears to be like straightforward, to excel at the very best ranges, where millimeters separate winners from losers in competitions that can stretch for as long as seven hours over a number of days, the game requires shocking strength, stamina, precision and agility.

Canada’s Brett Gallant curls the stone during the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing on Feb. 17, 2022.

(LILLIAN SUWANRUMPHA/AFP via Getty Images)

“It definitely takes a toll on your body,” Rachel Homan, a three-time Canadian Olympian and three-time world champion, said during a break in training on a brilliant Edmonton morning. “That part of the game is maybe overlooked; the physical toll it takes. It’s definitely demanding.”

The curling occasions at February’s Winter Olympics shall be held at the Cortina Olympic Stadium in Cortina D’Ampezzo, one of 4 event clusters in and around Milan. Canada, which has medaled in curling in every Olympics in the trendy period, successful a file six golds, will ship a dozen athletes — including Homan, the reigning world champion — to Italy to compete in the lads’s, ladies’s and combined doubles.

The U.S., which has received two Olympic curling medals, both in the lads’s competitors, will also have a dozen curlers in Italy competing in all three occasions. But if the game is a national pastime in Canada, one that competes with hockey for followers and media consideration, it stays one thing of an oddity in the U.S., where it attracts big TV audiences every 4 years during the Olympics, then fades from view until the next Winter Games.

“It’s so frustrating to see curling become the next best thing to sliced bread for a month and then it comes off the radar for four years,” said Korey Dropkin, a five-time U.S. champion and a 2023 world champion in combined doubles. “I want to see something that’s on national television in the U.S. every week. I want to be able to expose our amazing sport to the U.S. audience day in, day out.

“I hope that in the near future we’ll be able to create more opportunities for exposure for curling.”

Curling was born in Scotland in the early sixteenth century but grew up centuries later on the Canadian prairies, where the extreme climate, rural panorama and boredom offered fertile ground.

“In many parts of the country there’s long, long winters,” Dagg-Jackson said. “The farmers would be busy all summer, but in the winter they were looking for something to do. So the old adage in Canada is you could go to any town in rural Canada and find a grain elevator and a curling rink.”

Members of the Highland Curling Club, fashioned in 1898, play on flooded sheets of ice on Jan. 11 in Inverness, Scotland.

(Jeff J Mitchell / Getty Images)

The sport, which predates hockey by a number of a long time, was introduced to Montreal by Scottish emigrants during the colonial period, more than a half-century before Canada grew to become a nation. It then moved west as settlers pushed into what would become the central provinces, where the sport was performed on ponds and lakes before coming indoors.

In many methods the game and the tough situations in which it thrived embodied the standard values and traits — resilience, group, politeness, resourcefulness — that have come to outline Canada’s distinctive “northern character.”

Mair, the Waterloo professor, has studied the function curling performed in creating social and inter-generational connections and discovered the game might have been more important from a mental perspective than from a bodily one.

“I don’t know if you can appreciate what a Canadian winter is like, but anything that gets us out of our homes and talking to one another is really, really important,” she said. “We know how necessary it is that we spend time socializing with one another, especially in the dark winter days.”

As a outcome, it rapidly grew to become vastly standard, but for causes that went past sport. Most curling rinks, Mair said, present social areas where gamers can go to with the people they’re competing against.

“So you’re sitting there for half an hour with people that you might never run into in any other part of your life and you start to build social relationships,” she said. “In really small rural communities, those are pretty essential. That’s kind of how it started.”

Aksarban Curling Club president Steve Taylor demonstrates how to push off the hack to ship a stone in entrance of an all-ages group studying about the game in Omaha, Neb., in 2018.

(Nati Harnik / Associated Press)

It’s also why the flat lands of Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Alberta grew to become the earliest hotbeds of curling, which aligned effectively with the farming season. But the game didn’t keep there. Curling golf equipment soon sprung up on Army bases and in fishing communities, in big cities and small cities, where it was taught in colleges and performed in retirement houses. (Curling has taken a different path in the U.S., where it has become standard in nontraditional winter-sports areas such as North Carolina, Florida, Texas and the San Francisco Bay space.)

“There were entire generations, for the most part, who really had a sense of the game,” Mair said. “The[re] were plumbers and carpenters and teachers, they had regular day jobs and yet they were these really talented athletes who would take the sport to these elite levels.

“So you could come from a teeny, tiny club and you might know someone who’s playing in the national championship.”

That romanticism impressed a radio play and novella by W.O. Mitchell, a author and broadcaster who chronicled life on the Canadian prairies in the mid twentieth century. In “The Black Bonspiel of Willie MacCrimmon,” which was also tailored for tv, a cobbler from a small city in rural Alberta strikes a deal with the satan to commerce his soul for curling success.

American John Shuster watches Matt Hamilton, middle, and Colin Hufman, left, sweep his throw during a match against Canada at the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022.

(Brynn Anderson / Associated Press)

But 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 take on the timeless tug of warfare between good and evil, “The New Canadian Curling Club,” a 2018 comedy by playwright Mark Crawford in which 4 immigrants show up for a learn-to-curl class, is a trendy exploration of multiculturalism and acceptance.

What the immigrants share, however, is a perception that understanding Canada begins with understanding curling.

“It’s weird and wonderful. And like all good things, it takes a little time to appreciate,” Mair, who teaches in the division of recreation and leisure research at Waterloo, said of the game. “At first glance you’re not totally sure what’s going on. And then as the layers start to kind of unfold, you realize just how interesting and complicated and engaging it can be.

“It’s fun. It really is. It’s quirky and fun. And I think we need more of that.”

But, she added, a lot of that has modified since curling entered the Olympics.

“We’re at a bit of a crossroads,” she said. “Elite sport is doing just fine in a lot of ways. [But] we need to have a different conversation about community sport. It’s not about a pathway to Olympic gold. It’s about rebuilding our communities and providing safe and accessible sports for everything. And curling is just so special in that way.”

Curling debuted in the Winter Games in 1924 with just three international locations participating; Great Britain, which fielded a crew of Scottish curlers, received the gold medal. But the game didn’t return to the official Olympic program for another 74 years and when it did, the publicity fueled curiosity in winter sports activities powerhouses such as China, Japan and South Korea, but also in Afghanistan, Andorra, Bolivia, the Virgin Islands, Kuwait and Mexico, that are all among the 67 members of the World Curling Assn.

“There’s a little bit of perception from America that curling is small potatoes. And it probably is compared to the big four sports,” said Marc Kennedy, a world and Olympic champion from Canada who shall be competing in his fourth Olympics in Italy. “But it’s a big deal. Arguably one of the fastest-growing sports internationally. It’s massive in Asia. Some of our most popular athletes are from Japan.”

That added competitiveness — 30 international locations tried to qualify for this 12 months’s Olympic match — has not only raised the stakes and professionalized the game, it also threatens to crush curling’s gracious and well mannered traditions in a stampede for the top of the medal podium. In last spring’s world championship in Canada, for instance, Chinese athletes have been accused of touching a stone with a broom, kicking a stone and unlawful sweeping — all forbidden acts.

In most other sports activities, that would have been thought-about gamesmanship. In curling, the accusations alone have been an affront to the game’s custom and dignity.

Team Shuster’s Chris Plys throws the rock during the U.S. Olympic curling crew trials in Omaha, Neb., on Nov. 20, 2021.

(Rebecca S. Gratz / Associated Press)

“In curling you always divulge that you broke a rule … and apologize,” said Dagg-Jackson, the previous Olympian turned coach.

“It’s supposed to be a gentleman’s game. You’re supposed to call your own fouls,” added Chris Plys, a three-time U.S. Olympian. “Now we’re starting to see people doing questionable things.

“It’s sad because the best part of the game is just how honest everything is. And there’s people out there 1766938548 that are willing to do whatever it takes to win.”

Those athletes definitely aren’t dishonest for the money since curlers, even at the very best degree, have often had to work common jobs to pay the payments. That might change this spring with the launch of the Rock League, the game’s first skilled competitors, which can start play shortly after the Milan-Cortina Olympics.

“The Rock League is going to be a huge new chapter to the sport,” said Dropkin, the Olympian who will captain the U.S. Rock League crew. “That is going to present a whole lot of opportunities to curlers. Curlers now, curlers [in] the pipeline. They can actually make a living.”

The five-week circuit will characteristic six groups of 5 males and 5 ladies — one from the Asian-Pacific, two from Canada, two from Europe and one representing the U.S. — taking part in a selection of codecs during stops in the U.S. and Canada. Competitors is not going to just earn money based on efficiency, but will obtain salaries as effectively.

Historically the game has relied closely on prize money, which doesn’t go far. Kennedy’s successful five-man crew at the 2025 Brier, the annual Canadian males’s championships, cut up $108,000 of the match’s $300,000 purse last March, which didn’t depart a lot after paying for journey and housing at the 10-day event.

The Dodgers pays Shohei Ohtani more than that every time he comes to the plate over the next 10 seasons.

“I don’t think any of us get into curling with the idea of making millions of dollars,” said Kennedy, 43, a father of two who offered his frozen-food franchise 14 years in the past to help his curling profession. “You’ve got a lot of curlers out there that still play for the love of the game and for the opportunity to represent Canada at the Olympics or World Championships.

“If money was your motivation, then you’re probably in the wrong sport.”

Rachel Homan throws a rock during Canadian Olympic curling trials in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, on Nov. 25.

(Darren Calabrese / Associated Press)

For Homan, 36, a mom of three younger kids who has historically relied on sponsorships, stipends from the national federation and winnings from underfunded tours such as the Grand Slam of Curling to make ends meet, the Rock League has the potential to change not only her life, but her legacy as effectively.

“In this league, being a part of it, might not mean anything for me financially right now. But it’s more about what you’re leaving behind and what you’re helping create,” said Homan, who will captain one of the league’s two Canadian groups.

Financing a skilled league isn’t the only problem curling will face popping out of the Milan-Cortina Games, though. Because while the Olympics might help the game collect viewers, it has achieved little to reverse a regular decline in participation at the grassroots degree, which is robbing the game of its future athletes.

“It’s just hard to get young kids introduced to it and have access to it,” Kennedy said. “Back in the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s it was the community center. Everybody kind of learned curling, especially out west. That’s what was driving a huge part of our sport for a long time.”

Not any more. Canada, just like the U.S., has seen thousands and thousands of people flee rural areas for big cities over the last a number of a long time and as a outcome the local curling rink is no longer the civic hub it was when Jason Hills was growing up on the frigid plains of central Alberta. And what investment there may be in the game is now being directed to occasions such as the Olympics, the Grand Slam of Curling or the fledgling Rock League, not to building more group rinks.

“Curling had to pivot a bit,” said Dagg-Jackson, who takes her 5 grandchildren curling. “It used to be all about membership, about the thousands and thousands of curlers across the country. Now those few competitive curlers that shine in the spotlight are known to all Canadians because they’re on television all the time and they draw attention to the sport.

“Fifty years ago you just waited at the rink and people showed up because it was the place to be. Big events, Olympics, pro leagues, that’s the future of curling. But the culture and the lore, the history of curling, it’ll always be there.”