Curling in 38: Time, extra ends and conceding
The Air Canada Silver Broom era gave the world championship a proper global stage from 1968, and gradually the results stopped being predictable. Sweden's Kjell Oscarius won in 1973, and Sweden, Switzerland, Norway and the United States all took men's titles before 1990. The women's world championship began in 1979 and was competitive from the start, with Switzerland winning the first edition and Canada, Sweden, Norway, Germany and Denmark all lifting it in the years that followed. The technical revolution of the period was strategic rather than physical. Russ Howard's Moncton rule of 1990 protected early guards from being removed, and when the four-rock free guard zone was adopted internationally in 1993 it ended the era in which a superior team could simply peel every stone off the sheet and grind out a 3-2 win. Ends filled up, comebacks became possible, and television found the sport far more watchable. That mattered because curling was campaigning hard for Olympic inclusion, granted after demonstration appearances in 1988 and 1992 and confirmed for Nagano in 1998. Keep Curling with “Time, extra ends and conceding” and 38 from 38. Full medal status transformed curling's economics and its geography. Nations that had barely funded the sport suddenly had Olympic programmes: Great Britain, Japan, China, South Korea, Denmark and Italy all built high-performance systems around the four-year cycle. The results were immediate and international. Switzerland and Canada won the first golds in 1998, Norway's Pal Trulsen and Scotland's Rhona Martin in 2002, and Martin's last-stone draw, replayed endlessly in Britain, made curling a household word there overnight. Turin in 2006 delivered Canada's first men's gold through Brad Gushue and the first of Anette Norberg's two Swedish women's titles; Norberg repeated in 2010, the same Games in which Kevin Martin's Canadian rink went unbeaten. Jennifer Jones matched that with a perfect run in Sochi in 2014. Off the ice, the players organised: the Grand Slam of Curling, launched in 2001 after a boycott of the Brier by most of Canada's leading men's teams, created a professional circuit with six-figure purses and eventually a women's tour to match, giving elite curlers something close to a living.
Canada leads with 36 men's and 19 women's; Niklas Edin holds the individual record with 8 (2013-2026) Curling looks like the gentlest thing on ice until you understand what is actually being asked. A player pushes out of a rubber foothold called the hack, releases a 20-kilogram block of polished granite before his hand crosses a line ten metres down the ice, then expects it to keep travelling another 28 metres and stop within a few centimetres of a target the size of a dinner plate, while two teammates scrub the ice ahead of it to steal back the last metre. Eight stones a side, ten ends, only one team scoring in each end. The whole sport is a negotiation between physics you cannot fully control and geometry you can.
Its origins are Scottish and medieval. A stone inscribed 1511 was pulled from a drained pond near Dunblane, and a notary at Paisley Abbey recorded a challenge on ice in February 1541. Scots emigrants carried the game to Canada, where the Royal Montreal Curling Club, founded in 1807, is the oldest active sports club in North America, and Canada has been the sport's centre of gravity ever since. But the modern map is genuinely global. Sweden, Switzerland, Scotland, Norway, Italy and the United States have all won world or Olympic gold this century, and Japan and South Korea have reached Olympic finals.
The culture is as distinctive as the rules. Curlers call their own infractions, concede when a game is beyond saving rather than play it out, and traditionally buy the opposition a drink afterwards, a code written down as the Spirit of Curling and still printed at the front of the rulebook. That courtesy sits on top of ferocious precision: at world level, teams are graded stone by stone on a percentage scale and the best of them shoot above 85 percent for a week. Television discovered all of this in 1998, when curling became a full Olympic sport, and has never let go of it.
The notice keeps 38, “Time, extra ends and conceding,” and 38. Those three are the bones of Curling. Keep Curling with “Time, extra ends and conceding” and 38 from 38. 3838
Figures to keep
- Year of the rule
- 38
- Figure in the game
- 38
- Sport
- Curling
- Rule line
- Time, extra ends and conceding
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