Curling sweeps across America

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Picture: Benson Kua

Though Vancouver’s Winter Olympics have ended, the sport invented in Scotland has emerged as a smash hit in the US, where its popularity has reached heights previously reserved for baseball and basketball.

The New York Times has reported on the sport’s surging popularity on Wall Street while the Los Angeles Times reported on the sport’s unusually big draw on West Coast viewers. The Washington Post reported that fans were “drawn far and wide to the sport.”

The reasons? The LAT reports “beer and bloody marys for everyone” and curling’s “social” factor, while the NYT cites its appeal in helping investment bankers relax after a frenetic day’s trading.

New curling clubs, the Post reports, are being formed in the warm southern states of Florida and North Carolina.

Many news outlets are also citing the glamour effect of so-called “Vancougar” Cheryl Bernard, the Canadian team captain, and the Norwegians’ now-famous brightly coloured Argyll-patterned trousers, which have attracted more than half a million fans on the Facebook page devoted to them.

Sell-out crowds attending the later stages of the curling events have been unusually rowdy and loud. Sports figures in attendance have included track’s Carl Lewis and hockey’s Wayne Gretzky and celebrities included Pamela Anderson and Donald Sutherland. For the women’s final, tickets were commanding prices above $500 on the black market.

MTV even got in on the act, interviewing Harry Potter actor Daniel Radcliffe on the game’s popularity among teenagers. Watching it is like “you’re being hypnotized. Just watch … you’ll see,” he said. The sport has featured on The Simpsons and on talk shows Jay Leno and Stephen Colbert.

It’s the only Winter Olympics sport that has shown a sustained increase in TV ratings from 2002 to 2006, and finally to 2010, where more than 100 hours of live play were aired by US networks. Some commentators described it as “chess on ice.”

In fairness, the Winter Olympics was shown on US television at a slow time for American sports, when the US football season has ended, baseball players are still in summer camp preparations for their new season, and its professional basketball leagues are in a bit of a mid-season lull. It’s also been given a ratings bump by one of the most watched Winter Olympics in memory.

Felix Lopez, a Southern Californian sports fan more usually found cheering on his football or basketball team, told The Caledonian Mercury “he couldn’t wait” for the Canada-Sweden final.

“For the Sweden curling gold I was all atwitter. The girls can really play. And Canadian cougars rule!”

He followed both men and women’s events to their conclusion, often using social media to spread his new-found love of the sport, which he said he likes watching while “getting drunk and paying bills. Curl it my way or the highway, baby!”

Curling, a version of which was first played in Scotland some 500 years ago, was an Olympic sport in 1924 (Britain defeating France in the final) but then was not included again until 1998.

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