The Olympic flame will be ignited in Beijing in 29 days, but the Olympic Games will start two days earlier. Thanks curlers. They actually arrived on February 2, when even the bear was just thinking about starting the season, grab their brooms and look at things. Broom, stone, house and end. These are also discussed below, but don’t scare anyone, there won’t be a fast paced curling, and the most interesting thing about the sport that woke up so early in the Winter Olympics.
The Curling, sometimes referred to as a sliding disc by usurper Hungarians, debuted at the first Winter Olympics in 1924. Only those who started there died without knowing they were Olympians. True, in connection with the event in the higher part of the Alps, other participants also traveled home without knowing that they had attended the Olympic Games. The 12-day series of competitions was dubbed “International Winter Sports Week”. The International Olympic Committee decided a year later that it would now host the Winter Games in the year of the Summer Olympics, and then renamed the event in Chamonix to the First Winter Olympics. This is how the winners there became Olympic champions, but
Curling has not been considered part of the Olympics for an obscure reason.
Although three goalkeepers started on it (you could say: the national team!), although three matches occurred in total. Of these, Britain won twice, Sweden won one, and the host country lost both battles. Determining the final order was not complicated, but this was not a reason to treat the brooms there so harshly. They had to wait until 2006 to rehabilitate, at which time the IOC upgraded the competition to Olympic status.
Hand out medals afterwards. After 82 years!
Thus, in addition to the eight sports that form the basis of the Winter Olympics, curling became +1. Even at the discovery level, snowboarding did not last as a sport, and even alpine skiing was many years after its Olympic debut, when curling (as it turned out…) was already an Olympic sport.
Which sport is this at all? One in whom someone will take a beautifully polished, high-gloss stone of about 20 pounds and glide very slowly over the ice rink amid sensual gazes. Then for a while (because the ice is like this) he slips with it. Then he bids farewell to him with sad eyes and watches charmingly as he walks away with dignity. He can no longer do anything to control the movement of the stone, but his teammates can! Appearing before the stone and with a broom in hand, they sweep the ice so hard that if they did it so hard at the Hungarian railway stations, the local railway stations would sparkle more beautifully than the mirror gallery in the Palace of Versailles.
The speed and direction of the stone can be changed with the intensity of the sweep.
I don’t want to give advice to college teachers because tens of thousands of enrolled students will send me to a place where the snow melts every year, but amazingly good physical examples of the energy invested in sweeping and the movement of a stone can be produced.
I ask every physics professor to quickly forget my idea, and in return I will not detail the rules of curling! However, it is uncomplicated for the members of the two teams to take turns moving their stones and sweeping the ice, and the goal is to bring the team stone closer to the center of the house, about 50 meters away, at the end of the game (called the “end”). for the rival guard. You earn points, and even if there are more of its “inside” stones than the one closest to the opponent’s center, there are more points. When ‘The End’ comes at the last end, points are added (and not surprisingly! Whoever has more wins).
That’s the point, the things described in the other pages of the rulebook only refine that.
The “24 pioneers” of football managed to show off at the next Winter Games eight years later. But it was an Olympics abroad, and European footballers weren’t doing well enough to travel to Lake Placid at the time. Thus, the national teams of four Canadian states and four American states participated in the Olympics, so you can’t be offended that it only entered the yearbooks as a display tower.
After that, the sport disappeared from the Olympics for 56 years, so we can safely say that many age groups of curling have lived their lives without having the opportunity to reach the five rings matches.
So again, it was no offense as the sport was once again granted show sport status in Calgary in 1988, where it would have been fitting for the adjective “introductory” after several absences.
Then at the next Olympics, it was just a show number again, and in 1994 it wasn’t!
Then after a long period of vomiting, he finally became a full member of the Olympic program in 1998!
Since then, there has been no Winter Olympics without curling!
And there are hardly any curls without Canadian Gold!
Between 1998 and 2014, the gentlemen won the Maple Leaves three times and the ladies won twice. In Sochi, Canada won the two races. Recently, there was an American victory for men and a Swedish victory for women. For the third time, Scandinavian girls and women won, which means that they are “Canadian” in this field. Fortunately the latter was named the 2018 triple-digit winner and Canada won the mixed doubles battle.
This year, the firstborns will be competing in three numbers. We can almost support the Hungarians too, because Dorottya Palancsa and Zsolt Kiss competed for the opportunity to perform less than a month ago, on the 8th of December. In the final stage of the qualifiers, the two-time world champion duo (!) were eliminated in a semi-final match. That is, he was two wins away from the goal.
The competition with them was different, but if someone accidentally “runs” during the Olympic broadcast, take a few minutes of his life!
In the opening photo: Japan’s Fujifa Sakuki (b) plays for the women’s curling bronze medal in the Britain-Japan match at the Pyongyang Winter Olympics at Kangnung Curling Center on Feb. 24, 2018.
MTI / EPA / Javier Etxezarreta
