THE ROARING GAME
It was the sound I noticed first. A dull, distinctive roar. As I looked down at the rink’s four long sheets of ice, the source of the sound — a grey stone with a bright yellow handle — slid into view. Rotating slowly, it was headed toward a blue and red bullseye painted into the ice 30-odd metres away. The stone fell short of its target, earning good-natured commiserations from three of the four people — tourists from Christchurch and Nelson — assembled on the ice. I’d travelled through Central Otago to Naseby in Maniototo, home of the only purpose-built indoor curling facility in the southern hemisphere. With the Beijing Winter Olympics scheduled for February 2022, I had come to learn more about the sport that garners a cult following every Winter Olympic Games.
Curling is centuries-old; played since at least the 1500s on rivers and ponds frozen solid by harsh Scottish winters. That country’s national poet (and keen curler) Robert Burns immortalised “the roaring game” in two of his works, “The Vision”, and “Tam Samson’s Elegy”. The sport’s popularity gradually spread, taking hold anywhere that large populations of Scottish emigrants settled, including New Zealand. “The general yarn that we spin is that the sport came to Otago with the Scottish who were here mining for gold in the 1860s,” says Ewan Kirk, manager of the facility. “The region had the right sort of freezing temperatures for them to play all winter.” (The welcome sign into Naseby, situated on the Upper Taieri Plain, proudly declares it “2000 feet above worry level”.) Curling played then was a strictly outdoor affair, with the stones delivered from a metal plate called a crampit, fixed to the natural ice. “Outdoor curling is a bit hiff and biff,” Kirk chuckles. “The curler stands on the crampit, picks the stone up off the ice, swings their arm back a bit, and literally throws it.”
I’ll admit that this description was a bit at odds with my impressions of the sport. Often likened to “chess on ice”, hack curling — the style played at international competitions,
