Olympic Notes: Curling is first-rate fun

PINEROLO, Italy — You were just making fun of curling, weren't you? Well, stop it.

Curling is the best Winter Olympics sport going, period, because it is faster than the luge, more exciting than ice hockey and sexier than figure skating.

OK, so maybe we exaggerated with the luge part.

Here are some of the reasons why curling deserves better than to have people cracking jokes about it:

• Curling has beer. It is a wonderful blend of competition and refrigeration, the one Olympic sport where you can drink a beer and still win a medal (make a note of that, Bode).

• Curling has love. One Canadian writer said curling is the ultimate hookup sport up North. "You have booze, and it's mixed with boys and girls," he said. "One friend of mine had a good-looking girlfriend. I told him not to bring her." But the guy did, and a few bonspiels later, he was single.

• Curling is really hard. The goal is to deliver the rock down the 146-foot sheet into the "house," the large rings at the other end. The team that places one of its four rocks closest to the "button" gets a point.

Next time you're at the airport, step onto the moving sidewalk with only one foot. This is what it sort of feels like, only you're standing on ice, and one foot is covered with a super-slick piece of plastic, and you're trying to release the one thing keeping you from eating an ice sandwich.

• Curling has Markku Uusipaavalniemi. He is the skipper of the Finnish team at the Olympics — and he leads the Games in vowels and total letters. For the record, his name is pronounced "MAR-koo."

Notes

• To Jeremy Bloom, a former star receiver and returner at the University of Colorado, pressure means playing football in a sold-out stadium, dropping back to field a punt.

Pressure means heading for the NFL combine in Indianapolis later this month in hopes of impressing league scouts enough to get selected in the draft.

So where does that leave Bloom's other sport? What about the Winter Olympics and today's final in the men's moguls?

"There's not much like returning a punt," he said. "No one's running to take my head off."

• The Italian men's hockey team has barely a season of combined NHL experience — and it gets juggernaut Canada in its tournament opener. So, the team's expectations aren't exactly high.

"This is our Stanley Cup," forward Jason Cirone said. "The biggest thing is we don't want to be embarrassed."