This Side of the Pond

Britain has never been great at winter sports. When you lack much in the way of serviceable snow, it’s hard to pilot a luge in much of a hurry.

So it was no surprise to hear that we’d made it almost two weeks into the Olympics without a single Brit popping up on the winner’s podium. We have some excellent athletes, but they start with a disadvantage. The UK is many things, but a wonderland of snow-capped mountains and frozen ponds is not one of them.

Apparently, we set ourself a goal this year of between three and seven medals. Had we landed precisely in the middle of this modest target, we would have equaled our top medal tallies of all time – five each in 2014 and 2018.

On the other hand, we’ve come back from the Winter Olympics without a single medal to show for our efforts a total of seven times since 1932. For context, on the day that Britain’s luck finally broke this time around, the United States was third on the medal table with a total of 21.

Geography is the obvious culprit for our failures. We all know about the absurdity of tropical Jamaica competing in the bobsled race and actually doing pretty well at it thanks to the movie Cool Runnings, but they’re not alone in lacking ways to engage in most of the sports on the list.

In fact, I’m willing to lay a bet that the number of countries with the facilities to properly train for winter sports is half as long as the list of countries that are lacking. Britain is not the only one to be clinging to the bottom of the leaderboards; nor are we particularly surprised.

This is why I was so thrilled on Thursday to hear that we’d finally broken the drought. Our men’s curling team beat the USA in the semi-finals, guaranteeing themselves at least a bronze in the process.

I hadn’t realized they’d been doing so well – they won eight of their nine matches along the way. Not long after, the women’s team won their match too, moving into the quarter finals.

In the end, it was the women who snuck right to the end, winning gold, while the men’s team brought home a respectable silver.

I’m now kicking myself for not watching more of the action this year. There are three sports I will happily watch for hours on end, and two of them appear in the Winter Olympics.

My love of soccer is well-documented in this column, but I don’t believe I’ve ever mentioned my addiction to figure skating and curling. The former can be traced back to the sporting contests of my childhood, when Britain boasted the superstar pairing of Jane Torvill and Christopher Dean.

In 1984, Torvill and Dean became the highest scoring figure skaters of all time with their legendary routine to Bolero – still one of my favorite pieces of classical music. They won a perfect score of 6 for artistic impression from all nine judges, and my heart at the very same moment.

It’s often said they changed the sport forever, refusing to follow convention by ignoring the trend to use traditional dance moves along with a medley of disconnected songs. It’s possible I wouldn’t enjoy ice skating at all if they’d never existed, but I don’t have any memories of the before times.

They were glorious – angels in sparkling costumes who glid around the ice in an effortless dreamscape. We may never reach the top of the medals table, but we sure did make a mark in the ice skating while they were around.

It didn’t hurt that Jane Torvill looks a bit like one of my aunts, and I was still going through my early childhood phase of not being able to tell the difference between the people on the tv and my own relatives. I recall being very proud that my family was so good at sport – and had such excellent taste in leotards.

As for curling, I’m surely not alone. It’s the most inexplicable sport on the planet.

For a long time, I didn’t bother to look up the rules because it’s so much more enjoyable to watch when you have no idea what’s happening. Who on earth came up with a sport that involves throwing a big rock along some ice and sweeping at it until it finally comes to a halt?

For a long time, I had no idea what the point of the brooms was. Was the ice rink really so dirty that the teams were needing to clean it even after the match had started?

To be clear, I do understand that curling is a game of strategy, and that the teams possess the expertise to know exactly when and where to sweep to ensure the stone ends up in the right position. But it still looks funny.

While thinking about this column, it occurred to me to wonder where curling originated. Imagine my lack of surprise to find out that, yet again, it’s the fault of the Brits.

Apparently, curling has been going on in Scotland since at least the early 1500s. We know this because a stone inscribed with the date 1511 was found at the bottom of a pond in Dunblane.

Curling was originally also known as “the roaring game” because of the sound the stones make while they travel. I would definitely have signed up for that team at school if they’d kept the name, if only to wear the logo on my jacket.

The World Curling Federation (also a logo I would wear on my jacket) is still located in Scotland, even though the Canadians have taken the title of the sport’s biggest fans. Curling is also believed to be one of the first sports that was popular with women and girls, presumably because we get a head start on the training thanks to all that housework.

It seems only fitting that our first and only success at this year’s Olympics was in the one winter sport invented in Britain. A group of Brits also came up with the bobsleigh, but they did it while on vacation in Switzerland, so it doesn’t count. We may not be good at most of the winter wizardry that was on display in China, but at least we can sweep rocks with the best of them.