To understand the sport, picture a combination of darts, croquet, and bowling. Only there are brooms instead of mallets, and special nonslip shoes, and dart stand-ins that are finely polished granite stones weighing 40 pounds apiece, and they’re slid along a long narrow strip of ice called a sheet to a bull’s-eye that’s called the house.
Got that? Good. You’re ready for curling season.
Friday marks the opening of the Olympic Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea, where one of the winter competition’s quirkier events will again attract viewers who often start off unsure what to make of it, and end up fans. Many who give it a try are instantly hooked. Just ask Washington Redskins tight end Vernon Davis or Harvard junior Neekon Vafa, president of the Harvard University Curling Team.
Vafa paid little attention to the sport during the Winter Olympics in Russia in 2014, but when he connected with Harvard’s team his sophomore year to cross curling off the bucket list he drafted in high school, he caught the bug and “has been doing it ever since.”