Curling and Florida

I like curling. It's an interesting game... but it's not a sport and aren't the olympics supposed to be about sporting events?

Well, let me clear that up. Curling should be called a sport when games like bowling, bocce, shuffleboard and billiards appear in the olympics. The thing is none of those games are olympic games. Even golf isn't an olympic game (according to this site it was part of the 1900 and 1904 games, but even then some competitors didn't even know it was part of the Olympic games).

I wouldn't make such a big issue about it if it weren't for the fact that NBC has featured curling every day. While in Florida last week, everytime I flipped the channels in the morning, the only Olympic coverage I could find was of curling.

And I'm not buying all the "curling is catching on" talk. It's "popular" because NBC is covering it like it's poker. But I can see why: There isn't much else to cover in the morning. The more popular sports and the ones the US excels in (hockey, ice skating, speed skating, alpine skiing, etc.) are shown in primetime. That leaves the sliding events, biathlon, nordic skiing, ski jumping, snowboarding... and curling. Except for maybe snowboarding, no one is gonna watch the rest of those events. All the other ones get pretty repetitive, pretty fast. And unless you know what goes into controlling a sled down a big sheet of ice or shooting at a target after skiing a bunch of miles, you probably won't be able to connect to it. But most of us have been on an ice rink, and most of use have bowled or played shuffleboard.

So NBC is stuck showing the amazingly exciting game of curling to fill all those hours of olympic coverage they planned. And then I get reminded daily that curling isn't a real sport and then you end up reading my rant.

Anyways, here are the pics of the Florida trip over on Flickr.