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in the heck those people with the brooms are doing.
“It’s called curling because you put a little bit of spin on the rock
and it curls as it goes down the ice,” he says. “The sweeping is done
for two reasons. One is because the skip has a line he wants the
rock to follow. If it’s offline a little bit, he’ll want them to sweep to
keep it on line. The other reason is the two sweepers try to judge
the weight, how fast it’s going and if it’s right for the shot that’s
been called. If it’s light, and they think it’s not going to get there,
they sweep it to carry it further. They’ve actually done studies to
see how far high-powered sweepers can drag a rock. It can go an
additional 15 feet.”
Most of the Wilmington curlers credit the Olympics for their
interest. Vancouver in 2010, Sochi in 2014, and now PyeongChang,
where the U.S. men won gold.
“I started four years ago, during the Sochi Olympics,” Barry Lantz
says. “We had seen it on TV and it just looked cool. We found out
there was curling here and said, ‘Hey, why not give it a shot?’ My
wife got me curling lessons for a Valentine’s Day present. We came
out, there were 60-70 people on the ice, and just got hooked.”
Lantz soon discovered that the sport is a lot harder than it looks
when watching the best in the world on TV.
“It’s just like in golf. I can teach you how to hit the ball, but to
make it go where you want is something else,” he says. “It’s an easy
game to learn, but getting the finesse is hard. And the strategy
is very complicated. You knock other people’s stones out of the
house and get yours in the best position. It’s a challenging sport.”
The quirky game can immediately look cool when someone sees
it for the first time. For others, it’s an acquired taste.
“The first couple of times I saw curling in the Olympics I thought,
‘This is stupid. What are these people doing?’’’ says Mike Crum, a
recent addition to the club. “But then I kept watching it, and it was
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