[ManifestDestiny]

I have to say it makes me proud. To be Italian-American and see the States doing great in curling and Itlay doing good.


PINEROLO, Italy (AP) -- Men's
Official Full Results
Team Lsfe Total
6
7
The crowd sang Verdi and whistled with glee and then just as quickly hushed when Italian Joel Retornaz crouched in the hack and pushed off with the final stone of the match.

It curled ever-so-slowly into the target area, bounced off Canada's erstwhile game-winner and set off the frenzy anew.

Bocce has never been like this.

Neither has curling, for that matter.

"That's probably the greatest curling game in the history of Italy," said Rodger Schmidt, a Canadian hired to build an Italian curling program in time for the country to host the 2006 Winter Games, after Italy's 7-6 win. "You saw it. You just saw curling in Italy."

The Italians finished tied for last at the world championships and had never before qualified for an Olympic curling tournament; they're here now only because as the host country they're entitled to a berth. Ask his countrymen about the sport, Retornaz said, and they'll know it as "the funny sport that is like bocce."

The question - what do they do with the brooms? - doesn't bother him. "The important thing is, they talk about curling. Then they try to play and they might love the game."

Too few do, so far - about 150, "and that's if you count everybody and their children," Schmidt said. Canada is the world's top curling power, a 29-time world champion.

"To beat Canada at an Olympics," Retornaz said, "I would not have thought about that even yesterday." Also on Saturday, the United States beat Germany 8-5 in nine ends, Britain beat Switzerland 6-5 and Finland beat Norway 7-3.

Italy improved to 4-3 and is now in contention to make the semifinals, an inconceivable concept when the tournament began.

They call curling "the roaring game" for the sound the stone makes when it slides - a rumbling that echoed in the gap beneath the ice when, for more than five centuries, it was played on a pond or loch outdoors. The sport has moved indoors in Scotland and Scandinavia and most of all Canada, where tournaments draw thousands and more than a million play for fun.

To a country where curling is for fusilli pasta and granite is for the columns that support the Pantheon's dome, Schmidt came to cobble together a team. At the time, there wasn't a single dedicated sheet of curling ice in the whole country.

They solved that problem by knocking down the wall of a too-short bus depot that the city of Cortina didn't need any more. But finding people to use it took more work.

"There wasn't much talent," Schmidt said. "I don't want to insult anybody, but it's true."

Setting up shop in Switzerland, a four-hour drive across the Alps but closer to the top competition, Schmidt worked with the team and prepared for the games. Retornaz, at 22 the youngest man in the curling field, spent extra time working on his game, and in November he was promoted to skip - a cross between captain and quarterback.

"He's a fabulous young talent, but he didn't just fall off a tree," Schmidt said. "He was built, not born."

The same can be said about curling in Italy.

A good team can win a match; the same as in any sport. But it takes something more to build a sport in a country that knows nothing about it, and to this point showed little interest in learning.

In Retornaz, with glasses from Milan and a hairdo from Milwaukee, the Italians might have found their man.

Almost 5 million Italians watched an early match, making curling the No. 1 TV sport of the Olympics in its home country. Retornaz is stopped in the athlete's village and asked to pose for pictures.

"I don't feel popular. I'm just a normal guy with the hobby of curling," Retornaz said. "I would like to be popular for my curling, not my glasses and my hair."

That may yet happen.

In Saturday's matchup, Italy's lead was as big as 5-1 but Canada forced an extra end with three points in the ninth and a one-point steal in the 10th. The crowd's enthusiasm grew.

"It's fantastic for them. It's fantastic for their country," said American skip Pete Fenson . "Any time a country with as few curlers as Italy beats Canada, it's a big deal. It's pretty hard not to call them a powerhouse."

But the most unexpected comment came from Canadian skip Russ Howard, who said of the Italian crowd's enthusiasm, "I wish it were like that in Canada."

[Toro]

I was travelling in the Northeast this week, and I was amazed at pretty much wherever I went, curling was always on the television. I went into this pub that had five screens, one was turned on to ESPN and the other four to curling.

I've been explaining the intracacies of curling to my Florida workmates while we had it on at work. It made me proud to be a Prairie boy!

Quote:

Curling: A Sport That's All in Your Head
February 16, 2006; Page A15

PINEROLO, Italy -- Watching the Winter Olympics, you take a lot on faith. That snowboard trick was better than this one? Sure. The biathlete missed a target the size of an aspirin? OK. The figure skater did a double toe loop instead of a triple? Whatever you say.

Curling might be the quintessence of Olympic befuddlement. The athletes don't perform aerobic or muscular feats. They play a game that isn't especially exciting to watch, the purpose of which is pretty much a mystery.

And how's this for an advertisement? "It's like chess on ice," Roy Sinclair, president of the World Curling Federation, said yesterday at the Pinerolo Palaghiaccio, a cozy, 2,000-seat converted ice rink about 20 miles from Turin.

After 64 years out in the Olympic cold -- or in the cold, but more on that later -- curling was admitted in 1998. Inexplicably, it was a cable TV hit in the U.S. four years ago. Two NBC networks are showing about 70 hours of it this time; the audience for the first three-hour block was 10 times as large as for regular programming. Yesterday, two princes (Haakon of Norway and Frederik of Denmark) and a former king (ex-International Olympic Committee president Juan Antonio Samaranch) showed up to watch.

...

I like having curling in the Olympics because it's the antithesis of the demographics-driven, thrills-making sports that have been added to what the IOC grandiosely calls "the programme." Just check out the jocks. "I was too short for basketball. I tried skating and I couldn't do that either," says Joe Polo, a 23-year-old student who's on the U.S. team.

Curling is physical -- balance, coordination, paroxysmal synchronized sweeping. But its virtue is that it is the rare brain game in the Games. Curling is about board position, geometry, strategy and communication; the U.S. team employs a system of numbered voice signals to relay speed and direction from one end of the sheet to the other.

I wouldn't make "Chess on Ice" the centerpiece of a marketing campaign. But the big-money Olympics have done right by including a merchandising-transcending mind game, which, by the way, generates box scores' of stats. "It's a great mental drain," says U.S. men's team alternate Scott Baird, a 54-year-old insurance agent.

Curling's precision is as evident above and below the ice as upon it. At the Palaghiaccio, the air temperature is kept at 10° to 12° Celsius. To prevent frost from forming on the ice, there's no airflow within 15 feet of the surface. A Swedish curling official monitors the indoor weather conditions with the aid of a bank of computers.

For spectators, it's cold inside. Bundled fans occupied nation-based sections in the rectangular arena. There were painted faces among the Japanese, funny hats on the Swiss, and flags, natch, among the mostly Minnesotans in the U.S. contingent. Curling songs were sung to the tunes of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" and "Winter Wonderland."

continued...

WSJ (paid)

They have Canadian announcers, including Don Chevrier, doing the games down here in the States.

[Knoss]

canada must have been nervous, they need more beer.