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| Friday, March 5, 2010 02:48 PM |
| Curling: An Appreciation |
 by Fëanor |
I've been meaning to say, I love curling now. I'd heard of the sport before, but never actually watched it or learned anything about it until the Winter Olympics this year. I was hooked after watching my first match. I immediately went online and started researching the rules, the terminology, the strategy. And that's one of the things that impressed me right away - how much strategy and tactics are involved in the game. It's sometimes called "chess on ice," and that is really a pretty apt way to describe it.
Part of the attraction for me, I think, is that curling has certain things in common with my favorite game ever, Diceland, as well as with certain German boardgames. Each team works together to determine the optimum move - the best place they can put the stone on their turn - and once that's decided, they have to use their physical skill and dexterity to make that move, and put that stone where they want it to be, possibly knocking other stones out of the way in the process. It's a collaborative sport, and a sport that involves both mind and body - both tactical planning and physical coordination. Everyone and everything must be working in concert for you to play well. There's also a strong sense of fair play and good sportsmanship that's surrounded the sport from its very beginnings, which is nice. And how about all the yelling? "HARD! HARD! HAAAARD!" That cracks me up.
One of the things that it took me a long time to get my head around, and that I find particularly fascinating about curling, is that sometimes it makes better strategic sense to not score points, or even to allow your opponent to score a point, than it does to score one yourself. This is completely unlike pretty much every other sport I know of.
I really enjoyed the various curling matches I was able to watch during the Olympics (although the team I was rooting for won only once, when Canada's men's team took Gold in the final match), and I'm hoping I won't have to wait another four years to watch more. |
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