Olympic Curling, 25 Years Later

George Karrys

Feb 2, 2023, 00:05

George Karrys

Feb 2, 2023, 00:05

Nagano changed the curling world forever

It’s February 1, meaning this is Winter Olympic Month.

Quite a few curling athletes have made it to the big stage since their sport became officially Olympic, in terms of medal status, in February of 1998.

(We acknowledge, of course, the 2006 decision to retroactively declare the 1924 Winter Olympiad the first official medal-status Games for curling.)

Five years ago, I was reshuffling old boxes in the basement and began browsing through my Olympic stash. There were three boxes full of stuff from my team’s appearance at Nagano ’98—actually the delightful “cottage” town of Karuizawa, outside of Nagano—which included, of course, our women’s teammates skipped by Sandra Schmirler.

In honour of the then-20th anniversary, I took some photos and posted them to my “Curling Guy” Facebook page. They were popular, and the comments were lots of fun.

Here we are now, and it’s the 25th anniversary. Kevin Palmer of the Curling Legends Podcast recently started a new column called “Buried Treasure” which revisits selected stories from old issues of Canadian Curling News. His second column, to be published here shortly, looks at Nagano.

The XVIII Olympic Winter Games marked a huge moment for curling, as Olympic status paved the way for an increased professionalism among athletes and administrators of the game.

Players weren’t even called “athletes” back then, just “curlers.” Player fitness was slowly becoming a thing, but the memories of Curling Canada’s 1985 weight battle with Eddie Werenich and Paul Savage still lingered.

Many will say the Olympic movement ruined curling. Wayne Middaugh was one fellow who has declared this often and publicly over the years.

It’s true that as time progressed, Canada saw less teams enter men’s and women’s playdowns even as more and more curling facilities closed their doors. Over the same time period, a few more curling facilities were built in Europe and Scandinavia—particularly in Denmark, whose women won silver in Japan—and in the United States, too, although that didn’t seem to really start until post-Salt Lake 2002 and accelerate after Turin 2006 and Vancouver 2010.

And did it ever accelerate. The USA is growing its curling base, in both people and facilities, at a phenomenal rate.

We could continue debating the value of the Olympics to curling until the cows come home (another cow reference is coming up, by the way). Instead, inspired by the anniversary and Palmer’s column, this story launches a new series of Nagano Olympic memories, in words and pictures, from now through the anniversary date of the gold medal finals on Feb. 15. Some of them will be published here, and some on my Facebook page.

There will be never-before seen images, firsthand accounts, and numerous secrets revealed. Triumph and tragedy, the wild and weird, and so on.

In other words, I’ll try to justify a potential vanity exercise by making it interesting—and possibly fun—for you, dear reader. My true goal is to honour my teammates, including the Schmirler team, and our supporters, as well as the many Olympic friends I have to this day. And who knows, I might be able to get rid of some boxes in the process, and promote selected contents to a place worthy of display.

Let’s start with today, February 1, back in 1998.

Teams Mike Harris and Sandra Schmirler had won the first official Canadian Olympic Trials in Brandon back in December. Our team had then gone to “Wild” Bill Hunter’s Telus Classic in Red Deer, the precursor to the Grand Slam series, a mere 10 days later. After surprising folks by winning the biggest prize in curling history, we managed to win Red Deer as well, beating Trials rival Dave Smith of Winnipeg for the $40,000 top prize. I remember national coach Jim Waite, who had just been appointed to our team, was astounded that we won that event so soon after the Trials.

Meanwhile, the Schmirlers went into seclusion. Remember, they’d won three world titles by this point, and were already facing incredible pressure to win gold outright in Nagano. We were the guys that few outside of Ontario had heard about. So while the gals isolated themselves, we bore the full brunt of a steady media onslaught.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQQsE-VS5sk[/embed]

We were desperate to stay sharp, too. We were out of our provincial playdowns, as the Nokia Cup was scheduled during the Games … and we had no tournaments scheduled.

The first thing we did was go to Switzerland, and the Bull Trophy tournament in Grindelwald.

That amazing bonspiel has since returned after many years away, and I had the pleasure of writing about it recently, and I included some memories of our trip there.

Here’s what I wrote on our team sponsor’s website shortly after returning to Canada. No, I can’t believe I saved printouts from long-deceased webpages, either. Excuse the typos … I was pretty frazzled at the time.

Until reading that, I hadn’t even remembered how we did. Top four in tricky conditions, at our first overseas event, wasn’t too shabby.

Our sponsor, JVC Canada, also helped us create another event for pre-Olympic training purposes. We called up some Ontario rivals and played in a little homemade cashspiel, held at the club where I grew up and learned to curl. I found that web report, too.

Here’s the program of the day. Thornhill went all out, putting bleachers out on the ice as well as behind the glass, and they were packed.

I’d forgotten that my pal Steven Lobel got the call to spare for another pal, Steve Small, on the Howard team that day.

We split our games 1-1, and I think Howard won both his matches to claim the title of this one-off, never-to-be-repeated event.

Then it was on to Oshawa, a few minutes down the highway, for the third GM Goodwrench Skins Game. Does anyone remember that event?

This was a small, four-team skins cashspiel that was televised across much of southern Ontario—I want to say on Hamilton’s CHCH TV-11, but don’t quote me—and it went on to become bigger and national via Sportsnet. It was the rival to the McCain/TSN Skins Game at the time.

We had won the first two ’spiels against the usual suspects—Werenich, Russ Howard and Wayne Middaugh, the guys we just couldn’t beat to get to the Brier.

Although we’d played in Switzerland and at Thornhill, and been practicing like crazy, we knew we weren’t as sharp as we should be. This was reflected in a quote Mike gave to Sun Media:

The GM Skins consisted of just two games—if you win your first—and son of a gun, we won the whole thing, for the third time in a row. Werenich in the first game, Howard in the final.

Immediately, the courtesy driver from the Oshawa Golf and Curling Club threw us—including alternate coach Savage—and our massive bags into a van, and we were off to the airport.

Not to Japan, yet … first we’d fly to Calgary, to meet up with our fellow Canadian athletes from other sports for what the Olympic mandarins call “staging.”