70 Fun Facts About Curling

What is the target area at the end of a curling sheet called?

The house: its coloured rings carry no values of their own. Any stone in them scores a single point, provided it lies nearer the centre than every opposing stone.

Who throws the stones on a curling team?

All four players: each throws two of the team's eight stones, and whoever isn't throwing either sweeps or stands at the far end directing the shot.

What are curling stones made of?

Granite: the dense, fine-grained kind used for stones takes in almost no water, so melted ice can't seep in, refreeze and pit the stone's polished underside.

When curlers talk about a stone's 'weight', what do they mean?

How hard it was thrown: 'weight' is a stone's speed, not its mass. Sweepers judge it as they run alongside and call out where they expect the stone to stop.

What is the last stone thrown in an end called?

The hammer: throwing last is such an advantage that scoring costs you it. Whichever team takes points in one end hands the hammer to its opponents for the next.

What do curlers shout when they want their sweepers to brush flat out?

Hurry hard: both words tell the sweepers to brush faster and press down more, and the skip bellows them from the far end of the sheet while watching the stone's path.

What does sweeping the ice in front of a moving stone do?

Makes it travel farther and straighter: vigorous brushing warms the ice for an instant, cutting the friction that slows a stone and lets it bend.

What are modern curling brush handles usually made of?

Hollow fibreglass or carbon fibre tubes: they are lighter than the old wooden shafts, so sweepers can brush faster.

Who slides stones on ice in curling's earliest written record, from Paisley around 1540?

A monk: the record is a challenge to throw stones across the ice, written down by a Paisley notary, between a monk of the town's abbey and a man from the abbot's own circle.

If a curler releases a stone with a clockwise turn, which way does its path bend?

To the right: the stone bends the way it is spun, so throwers pick clockwise or counter-clockwise to swing a shot around a blocking stone and hide behind it.

Which painter's 1565 winter scenes show Flemish peasants playing a curling-like game?

Pieter Bruegel the Elder: small figures play it on a frozen pond in The Hunters in the Snow, one reason the Low Countries are sometimes argued to share the game's origins.

Why is curling nicknamed 'the roaring game'?

The sound the stones make over the pebbled ice: ice-makers spray on droplets that freeze into bumps to cut friction, and a stone rumbles as it rides over them.

A 1620 elegy credited with the first use of the word 'curling' praises a Perth man's love of archery, curling and what?

Golf: in Henry Adamson's poem for his dead friend James Gall, an old companion tells his golf clubs, his bows and his curling stones to mourn along with him.

Which Scottish poet's elegy for Tam Samson praises him as a curler who could 'guard, or draw'?

Robert Burns: his Kilmarnock friend was alive and well when the elegy was written, so Burns added a last verse announcing that Tam Samson was still living.

Scotland's national curling club became 'Royal' after a palace demonstration for which monarch?

Queen Victoria: at Scone Palace in 1842 the Earl of Mansfield had stones sent along a polished ballroom floor to show her the game, and a year later she let the club add Royal to its name.

Instead of stone, curlers in Quebec and eastern Ontario long played with heavy implements made of which metal?

Iron: their 'irons' were shaped like huge tea kettles, and the habit split Canadian curling into iron and stone camps that lasted into the twentieth century.

Which airline sponsored the Silver Broom, curling's men's world championship from 1968?

Air Canada: its Silver Broom replaced the Scotch Cup in 1968, and Canadian teams won the first five before going the rest of the 1970s without a title.

Curling became a full Olympic medal sport in 1998, at the Winter Games in which city?

Nagano: after demonstration runs in 1932, 1988 and 1992 the sport finally counted, and the first men's final produced a shock, with the Swiss beating favourites Canada.

Which country was retroactively awarded the first Olympic curling gold, from the 1924 Chamonix Games?

Great Britain: its all-Scottish team, a father and son among them, thrashed Sweden and France, and a Glasgow newspaper's claim on the families' behalf won them official golds in 2006.

Mixed doubles curling made its Olympic debut at the Winter Games in which city?

Pyeongchang: with only two curlers a side, the format lets smaller nations contend, and Hungary had twice won its world title before the Olympics took it on in 2018.

Why does a curling sheet have two targets?

Play reverses each end: the ice is laid out symmetrically, so teams slide all sixteen stones one way, count the score, then throw them back again.

What is the small circle at the very centre of a curling target called?

The button: before championship games each team slides stones at it, and whichever gets closer earns the right to throw last in the opening end.

What are the foot-holds a thrower pushes off from called?

The hacks: a thrower plants the grippy shoe against one, drives off it and glides out over the ice on the slippery sole of the other foot.

A stone must be released before its front edge crosses which mark on the ice?

It must also clear the far hog line or it is 'hogged' and removed from play.

The handle of a championship curling stone lights up red when the thrower does what?

Lets go too late: sensors in the handle register whether a hand is still on the stone at the release line, which took the call away from the officials who once judged it by eye.

Rather than being flat, the underside of a curling stone has what shape?

Hollowed, so only a thin ring touches: with so little of a stone of up to 44 pounds meeting the ice, friction stays low enough for it to glide the length of the sheet.

Which Scottish island supplies the rock for curling stones?

Ailsa Craig: rock this dense and water-tight is so rare that even Canada, for all its own bedrock, has never found a home-grown substitute and imports its stones.

Besides one Scottish island, rock for curling stones comes from the Trefor quarry, in which country?

Wales: Trefor's rock goes to a single Canadian maker, whose stones were used at the 2002 Winter Olympics, but every Games since 2006 has gone back to stones from the Scottish island.

Which firm in Mauchline, Ayrshire, has made curling stones since 1851?

Kays of Scotland: it sets an insert of one island rock into a body of another, because the first shrugs off water and the second does not splinter when stones collide.

What were most curling brooms made of before the 1950s?

Corn strands: the brooms looked like any kitchen's and shed bits of straw on the ice as they beat it, one reason push brushes have replaced them at every level.

What did the brooms at the heart of curling's 2015 'broomgate' row let sweepers do?

Steer a moving stone: the 'directional fabric' could slow a stone and bend its path, so 34 leading teams pledged not to sweep with it before the rule-makers had even acted.

What material is typically on the sole of a curler's sliding shoe?

Teflon: the sole is so slick that a player who isn't throwing can pull a rubber gripper over it to keep a sure footing on the ice.

In curling, what makes a moving stone 'burned'?

A player or broom touches it: no referee is watching for this, so curlers are expected to own up at once, and the touched stone is usually taken out of play.

What happens to a stone that knocks out a protected one?

It is removed, and the protected stone goes back: the rule shields stones parked in front of the rings early in an end, so teams can't simply knock every stone off the ice, a tactic that once made for dull, low-scoring games.

Russ Howard proposed which curling rule, based on his team's practice drill, for a Moncton tournament?

The free guard zone: in Howard's drill neither side could knock the first four stones of an end out of play, and a version of the rule was adopted for international competition soon after the Moncton tournament.

What is a 'blank end'?

An end in which neither team scores: a side holding last stone will often blank one on purpose, throwing its final stone away rather than take a single point and lose the advantage.

In curling, what is a score by the team without last-stone advantage called?

A steal: it is hard to pull off, because the other side gets the final throw, so a team without it usually settles for holding its opponents to a single point.

Which curling shot knocks an opposing stone out of play with the shooter rolling out too?

A peel: leading teams once peeled stone after stone to keep the ice bare, which made for such dull, low-scoring games that the rules were changed to protect early stones.

A curling team's 'thinking time' clock runs until what happens?

Its next stone is thrown: only a team's talking is on the clock, and the time a stone spends travelling down the ice is free.

What is a curling tournament called?

A bonspiel: in eighteenth-century Scotland whole parishes met on the ice, and a minister of the day wrote that honour was usually the only prize, though the winners might claim dinner and a bowl of toddy.

The 'Spirit of Curling' forbids what common sporting behaviour?

Cheering an opponent's mistake: players are expected to compliment a rival's good shot instead, and by long tradition the winners buy the losers a drink afterwards.

What is Canada's men's national curling championship called?

The Brier: the name was a tobacco brand owned by its first sponsor, and it stuck even after that company pulled out in 1979 under pressure over tobacco promotion.

What is Canada's women's national curling championship called?

The Scotties Tournament of Hearts: its winners skip the next year's provincial qualifying and return as 'Team Canada', a perk the men's championship did not copy until 2015.

Which Alberta skip won 2010 Olympic gold without losing a game?

Kevin Martin: the final was a rematch of sorts, as he had skipped Canada to the 2002 final and lost a tight game to the Norwegians, the team he now beat for gold.

Which Manitoba skip became the first woman to go through an Olympics undefeated, in 2014?

Jennifer Jones: her team won all eleven games in Sochi, and the last of them, the final against Sweden, ended the Swedes' hopes of a third Olympic title in a row.

Which Swedish skip was the first to defend an Olympic curling title, winning in 2006 and 2010?

Anette Norberg: when her double-gold team retired after 2010 she put together a new, younger one and promptly won the world title again in 2011.

As of 2026, which Swedish skip has won a record eight men's world championships?

Niklas Edin: Olympic gold took him far longer, arriving in 2022 at his fourth Games after he had finished fourth, third and second at the three before.

Which Swede held the Olympic, world mixed doubles and European titles all at once in November 2019?

Anna Hasselborg: the one big title missing from the set was the women's world championship, whose final she had lost in both 2018 and 2019.

Which skip led the British women's team to Olympic curling gold in Salt Lake City in 2002?

Rhona Martin: the final against the Swiss came down to her very last stone, a shot the Scottish press christened the Stone of Destiny.

Which Scot skipped Britain's women to Olympic curling bronze in Sochi in 2014?

Eve Muirhead: seventh as a teenage skip in 2010 and fourth in 2018, she finally won gold in Beijing in 2022, her fourth Games, after carrying the British flag at the opening.

In wheelchair curling, what must every team include?

Both men and women: teams must be mixed, and with nobody able to sweep, every stone is thrown from a stationary chair and left to run entirely on its own.

Which country won six of the first ten world mixed doubles titles?

Switzerland: Swiss pairs owned the early years of the two-player game, while Canada, the sport's great power, had still not won this world title by 2026.

What starts every end in mixed doubles curling?

Pre-placed stones: each team has one set in position, then throws just five more, and with games set at eight ends rather than ten, a match is over far sooner than the four-player kind.

The Russian curlers stripped of Olympic mixed doubles bronze for doping were also what?

Husband and wife: Alexander Krushelnitsky tested positive for meldonium, so the bronze he had won with Anastasia Bryzgalova passed to the Norwegian pair they had beaten for it.

What did curling's international governing body rename itself in 2024?

World Curling: the body that now runs the sport worldwide began in 1966 as a mere committee of Scotland's Royal Caledonian Curling Club and only became independent in 1982.

In which James Bond film do the patients at Blofeld's alpine clinic invite 007 to go curling?

On Her Majesty's Secret Service: Bond is undercover as the genealogist Sir Hilary Bray when the clinic's young patients call him over with 'come and do curling with us'.

In the 2010 Simpsons episode 'Boy Meets Curl', Homer and Marge win curling gold with which pair?

Agnes and Seymour Skinner: the principal and his mother notice Marge's knack for sweeping, the fruit of years of cleaning floors, and sign the Simpsons up for their Olympic bid.

John Shuster skipped which country's men to a first Olympic curling gold in 2018?

United States: Shuster's teams had finished last of ten in 2010 and ninth in 2014, so the 2018 title, the country's first in the sport, came almost from nowhere.

What kind of thing is curling's 'Manitoba tuck'?

A low sliding delivery: the thrower crouches over a tucked front leg and glides on the ball of that foot, a style kept alive in Manitoba by curlers copying greats such as Jeff Stoughton.

The 1511 curling stone shares its Stirling museum with which other record-setting relic?

The oldest known football: billed as the world's oldest, the leather ball was found hidden in the roof of the Queen's Chamber at Stirling Castle, where the young Mary, Queen of Scots once lived.

Scottish emigrants founded North America's oldest curling club in 1807 in which city?

Montreal. Its founders, about twenty merchants, laid down the club's rules at a tavern, and in the late 1830s the members took curling indoors, likely the first in Canada to do so.

Curling's first world champions, Canada's 1959 team, all came from what?

One extended family. Skip Ernie Richardson's teammates were his brother and cousins, all Richardsons, and when one cousin was replaced in 1963 they still won another world title.

In championship curling, what happens to a team that uses up all its thinking time?

It forfeits the game. Each team gets 38 minutes of thinking time for a ten-end game, so a side that dithers early can lose a match it is winning on the scoreboard.

What is a stone that only just touches the outer 12-foot ring called?

A biter. Barely clipping the ring is enough: the stone is in scoring position and can still count for a point.

What do curlers call the rare perfect score in which every stone a team throws counts?

An eight-ender. With eight stones a side it is curling's version of a perfect game, and rare enough that Canada's curling association honours every team that scores one.

Which player from each curling team normally agrees the score with the opposition?

The vice skip. Curlers work out the score themselves, and when the two vices can't agree a measuring device decides; if even that can't split the stones, they count as equal.

Curling is the official provincial sport of which Canadian province?

Saskatchewan. Curling was played there from the 1880s, before it was even a province, and in 2001 its legislature made the sport official to honour its world-beating curlers.

Which skip won the first Olympic women's curling gold and died of cancer two years later?

Sandra Schmirler. 'Schmirler the Curler' was only 36, and a foundation set up in her name by those close to her now funds newborn intensive care units across Canada.

Which actor plays the skip's estranged father in the 2002 curling comedy Men with Brooms?

Leslie Nielsen. His character, Gordon Cutter, agrees to coach the reunited small-town team skipped by his son, who is played by the film's director, Paul Gross.

Which band dodges a bomb hidden in a curling stone in a 1965 film comedy?

The Beatles. In Help!, George spots the smoking stone the villains have rigged, calls it a 'fiendish thingy' and tells everyone to run.