BofA is a sponsor, so today I got to go out to Wollman ice rink in Central Park and try curling with the women’s olympic curling team.
1. Curling is harder than Bocce. I’m a decent bocce player (OTW Crew – my team – went to semifinals of the Floyd tournament), but curling is doing bocce on ice, with 40 lb hunks of granite over a longer distance.
2. Sports that evolve from games played while wasted do not require you to be in great shape. The US women’s olympic curling team, while flexible and surely a fine group of athletes, is not shaped like the gymnasts, soccer or volleyball players. There are some skinny people on the team, but they are closer to the bowling team than the ice skaters. This is not a bad thing, but an amusing one. This the olympic team! It also jibes with my observations from the bocce tournament.
3. TV Sucks. Turns out the whole reason for us getting the curling lesson was so ESPN would cover the Curling girls and we could be warm cheering bodies in the background. Some ex-hockey player/coach came out on the ice, glad-handed and did 2 smiling minutes for Cold Pizza before walking off the ice. The sure way to get yourself into some b-roll and a little interview? Fall while throwing the rock.
4. I am an awesome curler. I got to throw twice and was duly admired by the olympians, complimented on both my form and length (of my throw). If only curling paid more than the financial industry – why must baseball, football, and basketball get all the loot?!
But wait, there's more
This work by MattK is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International