Our insider tells the 30-year tale

In the next few hours, the last-ever Pacific-Asia Curling Championships will wrap up in Almaty, Kazakhstan.

Both the PACC and Americas Zone Challenge tournaments are being replaced by a new competition as of 2022-23, the Pan-Continental Curling Championships. The new championships will be separated into two divisions—like the Europeans— and will feature teams from both the Americas and Pacific-Asia zones.

According to the World Curling Federation, the Pan-Continental event will “offer developing member associations from the Americas and Pacific-Asia zones an opportunity to compete on an equal playing field, giving them a chance to improve their world rankings and offer a consistent platform for improvement.”

The finale in Almaty—the 30th such event—is an odd one, in that defending champions China are not competing.

On the women’s side, both finalists will qualify for the worlds in Prince George, BC.

In men’s play, only the winner moves on the worlds in Las Vegas … and for many, that’s quite a carrot.

In the men’s final, Korea’s enthused guys are up against Japan’s Yusuke Morozumi.

On the women’s side, Korea’s Eun-jung Kim and Japan’s Sayaka Yoshimura are expected to meet in the final. It would be a huge upset if either of them missed out.

The December 2018 issue of The Curling News featured the PACC event on the cover. The story, titled Pacific Rising, was written by correspondent Hans Frauenlob, who has competed in 10 PACC events—representing New Zealand—and worked four more as a television commentator. On this final weekend of Pacific-Asia championship history, here are excerpts of his piece, updated where necessary.

My first PACC was in 1997, in Karuizawa, Japan, in the same venue that would host the 1998 Olympic curling competition three months later. I’ll always remember the pride the Japanese ice technicians took in the precision and quality of their ice. They had a handheld laser—still a new thing at that time—which they would use to show us how true and level the ice surface was.

The arrival of China on the scene really lifted the standard of the play in the competition. The first PACC they competed in was our turn to host, and was held in beautiful Queenstown, New Zealand. At this time, there were some rumours that there was some curling happening in China, but no one had ever seen a Chinese curling team.

As Team China arrived at the venue in Queenstown, I went over to welcome them. I don’t speak Mandarin, but one of the players spoke some halting English, so we had a little conversation. “Where in China are you from?” I asked. He replied, “We are from a small city, eight … eight …” As he struggled with the language, I was expecting to hear a population of 800,000... “Eight million people,” he finally said.

At that moment I had an epiphany... one billion Chinese curlers!

That team was already technically skilled— they could slide and sweep—but they had no idea at all about strategy. As we all have seen, that didn’t last long. Seven years after the first evidence of any Chinese curling, Bingyu Wang captured the 2009 world women’s championship title.

All of this growth has really changed the dynamic of the Pacific-Asia Curling Championship from when I competed.

In the early 1990s, the PACCs were dominated by Australia on the men’s side, and Japan on the women’s side. In 1998, our New Zealand men’s team broke the Australian win streak to qualify for our first worlds. I can tell you that Hugh Millikin from Australia was really, really reluctant to give up possession of the PACC trophy!

In 2001, Korea’s women’s team became the first non-Japanese sqaud to win the PACC women’s championship.

Selfishly, when I competed from 1997 to 2006 for New Zealand at the PACCs, we had a pretty good run. In those 10 events, we won four times, and medalled nine times. Yet we didn’t have a dedicated curling rink in New Zealand until July 2005.

If I was starting my international curling career for New Zealand right now, I would be much less likely to say we would win four out of the next 10 PACC comps. The standard of competition is far higher and much deeper now than it was when I competed. The best teams from China, Japan and Korea all compete on close to a full-time basis, which is really challenging for the other countries to match up against.

There is now quite a gulf between the big three—China, Japan and Korea—at the PACCs, and the other competitors. The gap is even more pronounced on the women’s side.

The first televised PACC was in 2014, and the massive growth of interest in Asia of curling as a television sport continues to impress. The television viewership in Asia for curling is mind boggling ... measuring not in millions, but in hundreds of millions, vastly more than those who watch in North America or Europe. No wonder the WCF is focussed on this region, which will of course peak with Beijing hosting the next Olympic Winter Games in 2022.

It is hard to overstate how popular televised curling is in Asia. Networks that have taken PACC broadcasts over the years include China’s CCTV, Japan’s NHK and NTV, Korea’s MBC and SBS, New Zealand’s Sky Sports, and NBC in the USA. When teams from the Big Three countries make it to worlds, viewership skyrockets. If all of Japan, China and Korea qualify for a worlds at the same time—which has never been possible until now—overall viewing numbers should be spectacular.

Teams that are Olympic representatives often become rock stars at home. The 2018 Olympic runs of Japan’s Satsuki Fujisawa and Korea’s Eun Jung Kim (the “Garlic Girls”) made them instant celebrities in their countries. The Olympic women’s semifinal between Japan and Korea was one of the highest rated broadcasts of the entire 2018 Olympics in Korea—an unbelievable 43 percent of all televisions in Korea were tuned in to watch that game.

The 2018 PACC at the Olympic venue in Gangneung was outstanding. There was a full television production with networks in five countries taking live games, in addition to WCTV’s online streaming coverage provided by the WCF. 

The gold medal games in both the men’s and women’s event were strong, high quality showcases for the sport. Minji Kim’s teenage team were the latest Korean women’s golden girls, while Yuta Matsumura of Japan showed there is some depth in Japanese men’s curling.

The Pacific-Asia region is here to stay as a force in world curling. Dedicated facilities in New Zealand have led to a new generation of competitive Kiwi curlers, with Australian curlers also training there. Olympics in Japan and Korea have embedded a love of the sport in those countries. The Beijing Olympics will be huge for curling in China. Kazakh and Chinese Taipei curlers are improving, and a rink project is on the cards for Hong Kong. In addition to Qatar, other Middle Eastern, Asian and African nations are showing interest—indeed, this year in Almaty, Saudi Arabia fielded a men’s team for the first time.