The Awesomest Event

Seriously, dude, curling is the best sport in the winter Olympics. Yup, curling. I have watched several hours worth of curling so far during this, the XXI'st winter games. And once I start watching it, I can't stop. It's ridiculously engaging. When you first put it on it's like, "this is so weird. They're sweeping the ice and there's a target and I just don't get it." But then as you watch it, everything comes into focus. It's actually sortof like if you put pool and darts together with air hockey, you would get curling. Someone was in a bar one day and came up with this sport.

It's basically just a spatial reasoning game. But then once you put together the strategy you have to go out and execute it. But it's not like the NFL where executing the strategy involves being more athletic than 99.5% of the people on Earth. You just gotta shoot yourself down the ice a little bit and gauge the strength of your shot correctly. I want to join a curling club. Do you think they have that at Chelsea Piers or something?

I know I'm not an Olympic level curler, so I guess I'm clearly wrong, but it seems to me that these teams take the wrong strategy a lot of the time. I seem to almost always disagree with the way the teams play particular shots. Also, the US sucks at curling. The men's and women's team are a combined 0-7 so far. And the captain of the men's team, who is 0-4, has missed 4 game winning shots to date. The womens team hasn't missed bad shots, but in the two of their games I've seen, they've suffered from one really super bad end in each game (the games are separated into 10 innings, except they're called ends instead of innings). They've ended up giving up like 3 points in a particular end in each of these games when the general wisdom of the game says that they should have scored one or two points instead. So both the teams have shot themselves in the foot. And at the same time I'm sitting on my couch having never curled in my life and I'm disagreeing with the strategy the whole way. And then I think to myself, "Yeah well you painted yourself into that corner and that's why you gave up 3 points," but the announcers seem to think it's just bad breaks, and I guess they know more than I do.

Anyhow, I haven't really been glued to this Olympics as I have in every other Olympics that I can think of, but I definitely love curling. I wish it wasn't only on every 4 years. Also I'm clearly drawn to the more technical sports, because the other sport I love to watch is speed skating. Regular speed skating, not that short track nonsense.