By JULIA FRANKEL, Related Press
Curling dates to the 1700s and was among the many handful of sports activities on the first Winter Olympics in 1924.
It didn’t return till the 1998 Video games with each males’s and girls’s competitors. It has grown in reputation and measurement: Curling would be the first sport to open competitors, two days earlier than the opening ceremony for the Milan Cortina Games in February.
The way it works
In a curling match, two groups compete to see which might get probably the most granite stones closest to a bullseye goal known as the tee by sliding it on a slim sheet of ice. The gap between the place a participant should launch the stone and the tee on the different finish is about 93 toes (28 meters). The sheet is just 5 meters or 16.4 toes huge and it shares stones for every group each spherical so it will get crowded.
Every spherical, for as much as 10 rounds, groups have eight possibilities to slip the specialized 44-pound (20 kg) stones towards the tee. They will purpose immediately for the middle, attempt to knock their opponents’ stones away or nudge their very own stones nearer to the goal. Methods embody blocking and takeouts.
Every throw entails all 4 teammates. One slides the stone, utilizing a deal with to make it curl, whereas others sweep the ice because the stone strikes, altering its pace and course. Workforce captains, known as skips, advise on technique. Whichever group will get constantly closest to the goal wins the match.
Phrases to know; The home (the general scoring space, centered by the tee); Ends, that are just like an inning in baseball in that every group shoots eight rocks (two per individual) or 16 complete; the hammer, or the final stone of an finish; the hog line, which is when a participant should launch their stone (21 toes from the tee); and pebbling, the droplets of ice on the sheet that affect the pace of the stone.
Who to look at
Canadian Brad Jacobs is making his second Olympic look after main Canada to gold on the 2014 Olympic Video games in Sochi. Standout Bruce Mouat of the UK will compete in two occasions in Cortina, blended doubles and the boys’s championship.
The Swedes are the defending Olympic males’s champion. On the ladies’s aspect, the U.Ok. is the defending girls’s champion however Sweden and Canada are among the many favorites.
The U.S. shall be represented in all three curling disciplines. Daniel Casper will lead the boys’s group, Tabitha Peterson the ladies’s and Cory Thiesse and Korey Dropkin shall be in blended doubles.
Venues and dates
All matches will happen on the Cortina curling stadium, with competition beginning Feb. 4. The blended doubles remaining is Feb. 10, males’s semifinals Feb. 19 and the ultimate Feb. 21 whereas the ladies’s semis are Feb. 20 and the ultimate Feb. 22.
Memorable moments
The Canadian males had gained gold for 3 straight Olympics (2006, 2010 and 2014) earlier than the People led by skip John Shuster grabbed headlines by upsetting Sweden to win the U.S. its first Olympic gold in curling.
Stefania Constantini and Amos Mosaner gained blended doubles in 2022, giving Italy its first Olympic curling championship. Constantini is from Cortina, so she and Mosaner will draw large crowds as they attempt to win gold at residence.
Enjoyable information
A mean curling match takes three hours, in response to World Curling. Blended doubles at Cortina will see two married {couples} and one sibling group face off. Canadian couple Jocelyn Peterman and Brett Gallant will compete in opposition to Yannick Schwaller and Briar Schwaller-Hürlimann of Switzerland. Swedish siblings Rasmus Wranå and Isabella Wranå can even compete as a group.
AP Winter Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/milan-cortina-2026-winter-olympics
