The Curling Controversy at the Winter Olympics Isn’t What You Think

The curling ice at the Winter Olympics is often full of shouting—but not like this. Last Friday, in a match that Canada won 8-6, a verbal altercation broke out between the third throwers from each team. Near the end of the match, after a debate over minor rules reached its crescendo, Sweden’s Oskar Eriksson passively aggressively accused Canadian vice-skip Marc Kennedy of cheating. Kennedy promptly declared that he “didn’t give a shit,” twice telling Eriksson to “fuck off.”

Within hours, the dustup had been covered by nearly every major news outlet and blown up on social media, inspiring scores of people to suddenly become experts on a 500-year-old Scottish sport. By the end of the weekend, they all had a fully-formed opinion on whether or not Kennedy touched the curling stone after releasing it, in violation of the rules. (If they didn’t have an opinion, they definitely had a meme.) Nearly all of them were wrong.

I am a four-year club curler in a Thursday night beer league and multiple-time D-bracket champion of local bonspiels. In layman’s terms: I understand the sport and its culture, but am certainly not an expert on how the game is played at the level where the handles have sensors. However, from watching the tape and reading analysis by other curlers, it seems clear Kennedy violated the rules by touching the back of the rock after the nose had touched the hog line. However, it’s also likely that this had no impact on the result—the violation involves a fraction of an inch, and the hog line is 93 feet from the center of the target on the other side. Light double-tapping of the rock before the hogline also seems to be fairly common, as there are now video edits purporting to show other teams, including Sweden, doing the same thing.

So, yes, the armchair curling experts have a point about Kennedy’s behavior on the ice. But they’re focusing on the wrong infraction.

Curling has thousands of rules and customs, many of them relatively obscure. Any club curler who cares about the minutia will have both bought and received plenty of pints in bets made over the current status of regulations on warming the ice in the house or single-stroke snowplow sweeping. But the first rule, and one that’s never up for debate, is called the spirit of curling: A true curler never attempts to distract opponents, nor to prevent them from playing their best, and would prefer to lose rather than to win unfairly. This is where this match went off the rails.

Curling is an ancient sport with a classical sense of personal honor, and it’s always better to lose than have your opponent believe you won unfairly. This is not ‘Nam, and there are rules. But unlike, say, bowling, the rules start and end with a ruffled-silk code of gentlemanly behavior carried down from the Tudor period.

There’s a prime example of how a minor and inadvertent rules violation typically plays out from earlier in these Olympic Games. In a doubles match between the US and Italy, one team accidentally kicked their stone. The opposing team trusted the kicker to put the stone back where it belonged—judges weren’t called in, and there was no cursing or accusations of cheating.

The Sweden-Canada match was very different. For anyone wanting to dig in a little deeper on the altercation, NBC has uploaded an excellent long-cut version of the showdown on YouTube, which shows the fracas beginning to heat up in the sixth end, just past the midpoint of the game, before peaking in the ninth end. The full version is telling. The Canadians go to the judges with ticky-tacky complaints about the Swedes touching a piece of their equipment while the Canadians were preparing to throw. The Swedes go to the judges to complain about the double-touch and are rebuffed.