It’s Friday, which is reason enough to celebrate, but for curling fans this weekend also brings with it the final rocks of the 2013 Ford World Men’s Curling Championship.
As of last weekend, the finals were almost entirely sold out, but I encourage you to grab tickets for any of the remaining matches if you can, even if you, like me, aren’t the world’s biggest curling fan. The best thing about this week hasn’t been the world-class curling (which has been fantastic) but the pervading sense of camaraderie inside the Save-on-Foods Memorial Centre.
Events like these see Victorians at their best.
Despite my deep-seated reservations about the way we do hockey in Canada, I’ll admit that it really is fun to cheer for your team — I understand that part of the whole “sports” thing, at any rate. In championships such as these, most people have the idea that the finals and semi-finals are the best matches, so you can watch your country compete for the gold, but sometimes the earlier games are more exciting.
Watching the powerhouse teams — China, Scotland and especially Canada — is great, but Canada plays a fast, efficient, businesslike game. They ruthlessly smash through the other teams’ defences, and that makes them sort of, well, boring to watch.
Often, the other games are more exhilarating. Take last Sunday, when the Finns had missed some easy shots and were trailing Denmark by a significant margin. The Finnish skip Aku Kauste called a risky shot in desperate circumstances, and the entire arena held its breath. He blew it and the Finns lost 9-2, but what an end!
Or take Monday night’s showdown between the young Danish skip Rasmus Stjerne and the more experienced fan favourite Thomas Ulsrud, he of the amazing pants. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, do yourself a favour and Google “Norway curling pants.”) The game went into an extra end and the audience was glued to their seats, almost an hour after Canada had defeated the United States and gone home.
My point is that the audience cared more about good curling than which country won.
I thought we were verging on overkill during the opening ceremonies when Mayor Dean Fortin talked about how much Victoria loves to play host city, but it’s true: We are good at it. I don’t know if it’s a Victoria thing, or if it’s just in the nature of curling to promote a friendly atmosphere (even between the Swiss and the Scots, who were fighting over who could make the most noise), but this has been a week of extreme goodwill and enthusiasm, and in the context of intense international competition, that’s impressive.
The experience drove home to me just how awesome it is to be in the middle of a good crowd. Any time you bring a group of people together to do something they all enjoy, you’re usually assured of good times, but I was impressed. The curling is fantastic, but it’s the audience that makes the event wonderful. The international experience really seems to bring out the best in Victorians.
It brings out the bizarre in us, too, of course. Crowd mentality can do strange things to a person. It might make one think it’s a good idea to don a full-face Scottish mask and kilt, or wear a tuque shaped like a curling rock and blow a moose whistle. (If anyone ever asks you, “What’s the most Canadian thing in the world?” you now have your answer.)
Happily, it also made the Swiss fans feel like handing out Toblerone bars on fishing poles to other members of the audience. Ah, delicious, delicious patriotism!
But regardless of which team the audience was rooting for, with four sheets of ice and eight world-class teams spread out before us in a bonspiel smorgasbord, we invariably ended up cheering for them all. When the U.S. skip missed his final shot in the sixth end and cost his team the game, there was a collective gasp of shock and groans of commiseration. Only after we sympathized with the U.S. were we permitted to cheer for Canada.
Canada is favoured to win, of course, so take my theories with a grain of salt, but it sure is heart-warming to be part of a crowd that cares more for good curling than winning.
