Most people unfamiliar with curling wonder why the players chase the stone down the ice, furiously sweeping the surface in its path. Once a player releases a stone, then the brooms come into play. As the stone slides across the ice, it will “curl" or curve much like a bowling ball hooks down the lane at a bowling alley. When players slide their stones, they use a special technique that involves a twist of the wrist. Players must strategize how best to keep their stones closest to the tee. Some players will aim for the tee, while others may aim to knock other players' stones out of position. Teams earn points when their stones are closest to the tee after all 16 shots. The bull's-eye is called the "house," and its center is the "tee."Įach player shoots twice in each end. So exactly how is curling played? Each game consists of 10 “ends" or periods (like innings in baseball), in which teams take turns sliding 42-pound polished granite stones across a sheet of ice toward a bull's-eye of four concentric circles 12 feet in diameter. After that, curling disappeared for many years, only recently returning to the Winter Games as an official medal sport at the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan. Many people do not know that curling was included in the original Winter Olympics in 1924. Scottish immigrants eventually brought the game to North America, first to Canada in the 1750s and then to the United States in the 1830s. Hardly! Curling dates back to 16 th-century Scotland, where farmers used large, smooth stones they found in local streams to play the game on frozen marshes. Some believe curling is a relatively new sport. If you've watched the Winter Olympics in recent years, you may have noticed an interesting sport called "curling." A unique mix of shuffleboard and bowling on ice, with the strategy of chessthrown in for good measure, curling features two four-person teams who alternate sliding a large stone across the ice toward a bull's-eye 126 feet away.
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