The Sport of Curling
Updated: Sep 29
Econ Buff Podcast #8 with Anne Barthel
Dr. Anne Barthel talks with me about the sport of curling. We discuss what curling is, how it works, and how the sport is organized. Amateurism and the Olympics is examined. We talk about strategies in the game and team construction. We consider competitive balance of curling, at the amateur level and at the Olympic level. We explore the facilities the sport is played in at different levels and how Dr. Barthel views the future of the sport.
Daniel Rothballer (GER) 2016 World Men's Curling Championship, Canada vs. Germany, 5th April 2016 05. Photo Credit: Fabien Perissinotto
Transcript:
LEE STITZEL: Welcome to the EconBuff Podcast. I'm your host, Lee Stitzel. With me today is Dr. Anne Barthel, a professor of economics and decision management at West Texas A&M University. Anne, welcome.
ANNE BARTHEL: Thanks for having me.
LEE STITZEL: So our topic today is the sport of curling. I'm a sports economist, so we're going to kind of blend some expertise here. And Anne is a special guest because she's a two-time German national champion, and she represented Germany in the Junior World Championships and the World University Games. So we have a bona fide curling superstar here in the studio today. So, Anne, start us off. Just tell us what curling is. Americans get fascinated when we see it on TV every four years, but we know nothing other than that. So fill us in. What is curling?
ANNE BARTHEL: All right. So on TV, curling, I always describe it to people as, 'Oh, that's the funny sport where you see people walking around the ice with their brooms.' A little bit more formally, in curling you have two teams, and they slide roughly 40-pound rocks down a sheet of ice toward a target. Most people compare it to maybe shuffleboard or bocce ball on ice. You have four players per team. Each of them gets to slide two rocks, and the goal is to score more points than your opponent. The way you score points is by getting your rocks closer to the center of the target than your opponent's rocks. So that's pretty much it.
LEE STITZEL: That's fascinating. I think it's a little unfair to call it shuffleboard on ice, since the ice is probably the hard part to deal with.
ANNE BARTHEL: True. The ice complicates matters. I mean, it's slippery. People fall.
LEE STITZEL: So you said you slide it. How far did you say? Oh, you said a 40-pound rock, which is amazing, by the way.
ANNE BARTHEL: Yeah. Don't ask me to translate how long the ice rink is. It's kind of like, imagine your standard ice rink where you play hockey. It's maybe not quite as long as that. It's a tad shorter.
LEE STITZEL: That seems really long. Okay. And then any idea how big the bullseye is?
ANNE BARTHEL: Yes. You have concentric circles, and the largest one is 12 feet in radius.
LEE STITZEL: That's awesome. I'm trying to envision it because I've seen it a little bit. How many rings?
ANNE BARTHEL: Three rings. There's the 12-foot, the 8-foot, the 4-foot, and then the middle is what we call the button.
LEE STITZEL: So the button is what Americans would call the bullseye. Fascinating. Let's talk a little bit. We set the parameters. You said brooms. Actually, before I move away from this, what are they actually? I mean, I think they're called brooms.
ANNE BARTHEL: They are called brooms.
LEE STITZEL: Brushes, right? But I can't go get my broom from my garage at home right now.
ANNE BARTHEL: No. I guess you could. It wouldn't be very good, and probably people would hate you for bringing so much dirt onto the ice. So you actually have to keep your broom clean because you don't want to bring dirt on the ice. But no, those are special curling brooms, and they have evolved quite a bit over time. Back in the day, it was corn brooms, and they would cause a big mess on the ice because part of the bristles would break off and then they would be on the ice, and the rocks would catch on them and go in all sorts of directions. Then they evolved into horsehair brooms. Again, those horsehair brooms would lose hair, and that wouldn't be good for the rocks. Nowadays they look a little bit like a Swiffer broom, if you will, and they just have this polyester surface, and you can sweep much more efficiently with that than with those old-fashioned brooms.
LEE STITZEL: Do those wear out, tear up over time?
ANNE BARTHEL: They do wear out over time. And actually, curling had its first big controversy a couple of years ago over the brooms, because the brooms were getting too good. The materials were getting so good that by sweeping in a specific way, like a specific direction, you could almost steer the stone. People didn't like that because usually the main skill of the game is coming from the person who pushes the rock, the person who throws the rock, really. That person controls how fast you throw it, so how long it's going to go, and that person also controls kind of the direction where it's going. Usually with the brooms, what you can do is sweep, and then as you can imagine, if you're on ice, the friction is going to melt the ice and your rock can glide a little bit longer.
LEE STITZEL: So it's about melting the ice?
ANNE BARTHEL: It's about melting the ice, yeah.
LEE STITZEL: I had the impression that it was literally sort of sandpapering the ice.
ANNE BARTHEL: No, it's about the friction melting the ice, and then on that water film you can keep the stone from slowing down, so it's going to glide a little longer. The other thing is, whenever the player releases the rock, they give it a spin. So they either spin it clockwise or counterclockwise.
LEE STITZEL: You can't just release it straight?
ANNE BARTHEL: You can. Well, you can try, but what then happens is that the rock just randomly will pick one. So if you just try to throw the rock perfectly straight, it'll pick up either a counterclockwise or a clockwise turn.
LEE STITZEL: So when somebody like me watches that sport, part of what makes it so interesting is throwing something that looks like a giant rock and seeing it sliding so smoothly. What is the rock itself made out of? Is that like marble or granite?
ANNE BARTHEL: Granite.
LEE STITZEL: Granite. Okay. Do they have some kind of coating?
ANNE BARTHEL: I'm not sure. I mean, they polish the granite. And there's one island in Scotland where pretty much all of the granite for curling rocks comes from. They take that granite from that particular island and they make all the curling stones out of it.
LEE STITZEL: I don't mean to put you on the spot here, because this is a hard thing to know, but it strikes me as the first place that we can really jump in with some economics. Any sense of the price or cost of production for the curling stones?
ANNE BARTHEL: I have no idea what the cost of production of a curling stone is. I do know that they're very expensive.
LEE STITZEL: What makes them so expensive? I mean, maybe we have a monopoly here for curling stones. What if only we had more curling stone producers, right?
ANNE BARTHEL: Yeah.
LEE STITZEL: That's what I was wondering. It could fundamentally be a cost-of-production problem. The stone is so rare, or it's really something hard to shape and form, potentially. I don't know if that's true. It could fundamentally be about the difficulty of producing the thing, or it could be monopoly pricing. Those could be explanations.
ANNE BARTHEL: My guess is that it's probably that this kind of granite is particularly good for making curling stones. I think the cost of production itself is probably, I mean, yes, it's going to cost you something, but I don't see why you couldn't have somebody else making the same kind of stones out of different granite. I just think it's probably the quality of the granite that makes this producer a monopoly. And then also, I guess, consistency a little bit. If you imagine if you had different stones produced by different companies, well, the stones are already different from club to club, right? I mean, from sheet to sheet, each stone is different. So what curlers usually do at the beginning of a tournament, it's kind of funny, they get a day to practice with the stones. What you'll see all the teams doing is they're going to have somebody try to throw the stones as consistently as possible, and they will time them with stopwatches to make sure that they have that kind of consistency. Then they have somebody else chart down how far that stone ran, how much did it curl. By how much did it curl, I mean how much of a turn did it take from that clockwise or counterclockwise rotation. The stones don't run in a straight line. They always do a little bit of a curve. Depending on the stone, if you throw two different stones on exactly the same path, you might get more or less curl depending on the stone. So in the beginning of the tournament, the players are going to try to figure out which ones are the faster stones, which ones are the slower stones, which ones make more of a turn, which ones run straighter, and then they try to match them up as best they can so that one player has two pretty consistent stones.
LEE STITZEL: So is that where the name curling comes from, from the fact that the stones curl?
ANNE BARTHEL: Yes. That's where the name comes from.
LEE STITZEL: Can we go back to the broom momentarily? What was the problem with this? You said steering.
ANNE BARTHEL: Yeah. So the problem then was that with those new brooms you were able to essentially direct the stone. If you had the person on the right of the stone sweep, one thing was happening. If you had the person on the left sweep, the stone would go the opposite direction. Instead of really relying on the person who threw it to set it on the right path and have the right speed, you could do so much by sweeping. Some people compared it to a remote control, that you could almost remote-control the stone to where you wanted it to go. It kind of took away from the skill of the player. It was more the skill of the sweepers. The World Curling Federation, which is the main governing body in the sport of curling, at some point did a survey that they sent to all curlers, essentially, that they had registered anywhere. People participated in the survey, and they asked, what should the game of curling be like? Where should the main skill come from? Should it be from sweeping? Should it be from throwing the stone? I guess the overwhelming majority wanted more focus on how the stone is thrown and less focus on the sweeping. As a result, they started regulating what kind of brush heads you can have on your brooms. That ruled out those really remote-control-like brooms for the players. Now they still have very good brooms, but you can't do as much as you could a couple of years ago when those crazy pads were out, where you could just steer your rock and it made everybody look great because you could steer the rock to exactly where you wanted it to go.
LEE STITZEL: As a top-flight curler yourself, how did you come down on that issue?
ANNE BARTHEL: I voted. I participated in that survey, and I voted for more focus on the person who throws the rock. I guess I'm a traditionalist in that sense. I think that's what really makes the game interesting, that you have people who just have such precision, such a good sense of how fast they need to throw the rock. Yes, the sweepers should be able to do something, but we don't want it essentially to just come down to sweep left, sweep right, sweep left, sweep right.
LEE STITZEL: Somebody who watches the sport, you don't pick up on that, and maybe it's just because I didn't listen to the commentary when I was watching it. It seems like the sweepers are doing the work. You can see that they can't move the stone that far, but I guess I have a misperception about the game if you're saying the thrower, that's the talent.
ANNE BARTHEL: I think from the viewer's angle, unless you knew what was going on, you couldn't really tell the difference between somebody sweeping with an old-fashioned broom and somebody sweeping with the new broom. I guess that's something that the people who played and who experienced the difference could tell.
LEE STITZEL: That leads us perfectly into a little conversation about team formation. What does team formation look like? You have one thrower and a set of sweepers? First of all, how many people on the team? Do they fit into certain roles? Do they take turns doing the different roles? How does that work?
ANNE BARTHEL: You have four players on the ice. Usually teams, or oftentimes teams, also have a substitute. You don't sub those in during a game. Usually it's more during the course of a tournament they might come in at some point. But you have four people on the ice. The first player is called the lead. Each player plays two stones. So the lead goes first. Then the second player is called the second. The third player is generally the vice-skip, and then the fourth player is the skip. By skip we mean it's kind of the team captain, the one who decides the strategy. The skip is the one who usually stands at the other end of the ice rink, and they're the one who will hold down their broom as the target for the thrower to aim at. Then they will also decide, okay, this is what we're going to do with our next move, this is what we want to do with this rock.
LEE STITZEL: Those are set things throughout a game? You said each person throws two stones and then you described the positions. So if we were a team, we wouldn't rotate through those positions?
ANNE BARTHEL: No. Each person has their set position. So if I am the skip, then I'm going to be skip for the entire game, and that means I usually always go last. You can change it up a little bit. The skip doesn't have to be the one who throws the last two rocks, but traditionally that's how it goes.
LEE STITZEL: So you throw two rocks. Is that within, sort of, games within a match? Is that how that works?
ANNE BARTHEL: That's within a game. I compare it to baseball. In baseball you have innings, and in curling we call innings ends. One end is each team plays their eight stones. Team one's lead goes, team two's lead goes, team one's lead plays their second stone, team two's lead plays their second stone. So the teams alternate. You have the leads play their first two stones, then the seconds go, then the thirds go, and then the skips go. Once the skips are done, once the last stone of that end is thrown, then we count the points and we start over. We start the next end, so then the leads go again.
LEE STITZEL: So everybody throws two stones per end.
ANNE BARTHEL: Correct.
LEE STITZEL: Very cool. Help me with this because you said the skip stands at the end and gives the marker. But then the last two stones they're throwing, so somebody rotates into that role, right?
ANNE BARTHEL: The third, usually the vice-skip, is the one who's going to come up. It's also an opportunity for them to talk strategy a little bit more, because the skip's stones, the last two stones, are generally the most important ones of each end. So the vice-skip and the skip are going to be talking strategy, and then the vice-skip stays down there and will hold the broom as the target for the skip. The other two players, the ones who are not throwing the stone and not standing at the other end, those are the ones that you see sweeping. That's generally mostly the lead and the second.
LEE STITZEL: So for the first six stones, we have the skip down at the end, and then the other three rotate between throwing and sweeping.
ANNE BARTHEL: Correct.
LEE STITZEL: So the skip never sweeps, then?
ANNE BARTHEL: No. It's always a joke in curling that the skips are the ones who can't sweep because they hardly ever have to. The only sweeping that they do is in the back, in the target area. We call the target area the house, and skips are allowed to sweep the opponent's rocks once they have crossed the line in the center, what we call the tee line, in the target area. So you can sweep the opponent's rocks once they cross that line. That's what the skips do.
LEE STITZEL: So if you're the lead and I'm the skip, and you throw and you hit an opponent's stone and it begins to move, then I could come in and sweep to help it accelerate out of there?
ANNE BARTHEL: Right, once it has crossed that line in the middle of the target area, in the middle of the house, then you can sweep it.
LEE STITZEL: Given this new information, it seems obvious that throwing should be the main part of the sport, because everybody throws. Skips never sweep, so why would we want sweeping to be dominating the game? It wouldn't make sense to me.
ANNE BARTHEL: Yeah, I agree.
LEE STITZEL: As a non-curling fan or observer, my opinion doesn't mean anything, but I can definitely see it. So you've said the word strategy several times. Just in really broad strokes, I'm sure it gets into the minutiae as it does with any sport, how does the strategy kind of play out within an end and across, what do you call a collection of ends?
ANNE BARTHEL: A game. We usually play either eight ends, so eight rounds of this, or ten, depending on what kind of tournament you're at. Championships are generally ten ends, and each end lasts roughly 15 minutes. A curling match is actually quite a lengthy affair.
LEE STITZEL: How long did you say? Fifteen minutes per end, approximately? So if you play ten ends, that's going to get you to two and a half hours.
ANNE BARTHEL: Right. Yeah, it takes a while. In each end, so I lost my train of thought. What was I answering?
LEE STITZEL: Sorry, I distracted you. We were talking about how many ends make a game, and then how long it takes, two independent things. You were getting to strategy.
ANNE BARTHEL: That's exactly it. Within each end you have your strategy. Your strategy is usually to score points, even though sometimes you're in the funny situation that you don't want to score points. The reason for that is that in curling it's a really big advantage if you're the team that has the last rock. Curling has a very clear last-mover advantage in each round, if you will. The reason is obvious, right? If I'm the last one to go, even if at the moment there are only your rocks in the target area, I can still change that. I can still put mine in the center and score points. Being able to go last is really important.
LEE STITZEL: I don't think we've mentioned the scoring strategy. How does that work? All the stones in the house count? Only the ones closest?
ANNE BARTHEL: Only the ones closest. So all of my stones that are closer than your closest one.
LEE STITZEL: I see. So it could be that you have all of your eight stones somewhere in the target area and I only have one, but as long as mine is the one that's closest to the center, I still get a point and all of yours don't count for anything.
ANNE BARTHEL: Correct.
LEE STITZEL: So if you played against me, because I'm terrible, all of my stones would probably end up at the back or very short, and then you throw all eight stones in the center perfectly and you have eight points and I would have none.
ANNE BARTHEL: That would be correct.
LEE STITZEL: Or by some happenstance I got a few in there, then you would knock them out and throw a few of your own stones in. That's where the strategy develops, right?
ANNE BARTHEL: Right. You want to try to, of course, score more points in the end than your opponent, and you also want to, if possible, have the last rock. The team that scores in any round is the one that has to go first in the next end. So scoring comes at the cost that the next round the other team is going to have the last-rock advantage. One strategy is, if you have the last rock, you want to try to score at least two points because you should always be able to score one point. To really take advantage of having last rock, you want to score two. If you imagine, if I only score one point, well then you score one point the next round, and then I score one point, and we're never getting anywhere.
LEE STITZEL: So how does that work then? You have the last rock, and I have thrown and I have one in there. You would like to have last rock next time, but then I would be getting a point if you don't throw it in there. How does that strategy play out?
ANNE BARTHEL: Depending on where we are within the match, sometimes, yes, you will allow the other team to score one point. Generally, if I have last rock, I might score one and just say, okay, fine, I'll take my one, and then I'll try to hold you to one in the next end. That's one strategy. Sometimes at the end, if let's say I go last and the entire target area, the entire house, is empty, there's nothing in there because nobody has put anything in there, then I might just throw mine through. I might just say, thank you very much, I don't want to score one point. I would rather try to score two points next round. If nobody scores in one end, then the team that currently has last rock gets to keep it. That's usually a very confusing thing for people when they're watching it on TV for the first time, because they'll see that the entire house is open, there's nothing in there, and then all of a sudden they just completely miss. People are like, why did he miss that shot? In reality, no, he didn't miss the shot. He just on purpose made it go through so that they wouldn't score that one point.
LEE STITZEL: So when I see all those tweets about all these curlers are so terrible, they missed an open shot, they're actually engaged in last-rock strategy?
ANNE BARTHEL: Most of the time. Sometimes they might miss one, right? I mean, that could happen too.
LEE STITZEL: Well, this is the problem with Twitter, though, people reacting instantaneously to things they don't understand.
ANNE BARTHEL: Well, yeah, it happens.
LEE STITZEL: But things like the Olympics are essentially what Twitter's for in my mind, just react to things you've never seen before. Okay, so we've talked a little bit about the scoring and the strategy, and I think we kind of have a picture of that. One of the things that I wanted to ask when we were talking about brooms, and it got away from me, was how do people move about the ice? Because it's ice, so I can't just be wearing my sneakers, I assume, but they're not wearing skates either. So what are they doing?
ANNE BARTHEL: They are wearing specific curling shoes. Those are specially made shoes. Generally, a right-handed person is going to have a very slippery Teflon, or some very slippery material, sometimes a steel surface, on their left shoe, so the opposite to your dominant hand. And if you're left-handed, the opposite way around. Then on your right foot you're generally going to have a very soft rubber sole because that grips really well on the ice. So one shoe is very slippery, the other shoe grips very well. That way, when you see them throw the rock, you're going to see them going into that sliding position where they're sliding on that one foot and just dragging the other one behind them. That's what you need the special shoes for.
LEE STITZEL: Yeah, you couldn't use skates. That wouldn't work at all. So everybody, all four players, are doing that?
ANNE BARTHEL: Yes.
LEE STITZEL: And for the same purposes of pushing off, sliding and throwing, as well as pushing and sliding while I'm sweeping?
ANNE BARTHEL: You will have the same shoes the entire time. What a lot of people use is something that we call a gripper. It's kind of a soft rubber thing that you can put over your sliding shoe. While you're sweeping, a lot of people like to just be able to walk normally instead of having to slide, so you just put the gripper over it, and that way you can walk even better than with tennis shoes on ice.
LEE STITZEL: So if I'm not doing that, if I have one slippery and one grippy, and I have to have sweepers on either side of the stone, if I have two right-handed people then somebody's got the wrong foot to push off of. How do you cope with that?
ANNE BARTHEL: That's a common problem, and you're just going to have one person sweep in a slightly uncomfortable position.
LEE STITZEL: Usually also just suck it up.
ANNE BARTHEL: Yeah, exactly. I ended up being that person quite a bit on some of my teams.
LEE STITZEL: So what's the physical strategy there? I can sort of feel the discomfort of what it would be like to drag myself along with my upfield foot.
ANNE BARTHEL: I always wore the gripper if I had to sweep on the other side, because then at least you can walk. Then it's just kind of, you're twisted a little bit funny. Your right hand would generally be the one at the top when you're sweeping if you're right-handed. You want to have the right hand on top of the broom and the left hand toward the bottom, and that's going to be much more comfortable if I am on the right side of the stone. But if I have to go over to the left side, then I'm kind of twisted around a little bit funny. Over time people figure out a way how they can do it without it being too uncomfortable. Some people also just switch. Some people just adjust their grip and learn to sweep the other way around.
LEE STITZEL: Yeah, that makes sense. Given your impressive resume here, I think I'd be remiss if I didn't ask what position you typically played. I assume you probably did a little bit of all of it.
ANNE BARTHEL: In Germany, for the most part I played second. I was the second player, so I did my fair share of sweeping. If I had to describe what it is that the second does the most, you're kind of a specialist for knocking the other team's stones out. Most often, once we get to the second player, that's when a couple of rocks are in play, and so the second player very often has to knock some of the opponent's rocks out. That was my favorite, usually.
LEE STITZEL: That's good. That transitions us really nicely into strategy of actually how you throw the rocks. So if I were throwing the first stone, I'm not just going to throw it straight to the bullseye because obviously that's going to give the next person an easier shot and they just knock me out or whatever, right? That obviously isn't a strategy that could work.
ANNE BARTHEL: It actually sometimes is a good point. If you do that, if you throw it right on the bullseye, to most people that seems like a really aggressive strategy, like I'm going straight for the center, I am really trying to put pressure on the other team. Well, in fact, that's the most defensive strategy that you could play. Because if you put it right in the center, then the other team can just knock it out. Well, then you can knock my stone out, then I can knock your stone out. So we're going to be playing a very simple game of just knocking each other's stones out through all 16 stones, and we're probably going to end up with maybe somebody scoring one point or nobody scoring anything because we're going to choose to keep the last rock.
LEE STITZEL: I see. That's very defensive.
ANNE BARTHEL: That's how curling actually turned out to be for a long time when the rules were very basic. People were getting frustrated because that was just so boring to watch. People would play this for the first seven ends and nobody would score, and then one team would score one point in the last end, so your curling match would end one to zero. People were saying, well, this is stupid, we don't like watching this game. How can we make it more interesting? How can we force the teams to have a couple more rocks in play? What they came up with was a rule called the free guard zone. That means, for the first four rocks, and I think they've recently extended it to the first five rocks if I'm not mistaken, but when I was playing mostly it was four rocks, you can't knock out any of the rocks that are not touching the target area. If you look at the target area, those concentric circles, there's also in front of those circles a little bit of an area where you can place rocks, and if you put one there we call them guards. They're guarding rocks. Given that the rock doesn't go completely straight but kind of makes this turn, you can sneak rocks behind those guard rocks. Since you can't remove those rocks that are out front, those guards, with the first player's stones, it gives the players the opportunity to have something else to work with, to have some guards that they can hide stones behind, and that'll make it harder for the other teams to get those out.
LEE STITZEL: Okay, so a couple things came to mind. One is, when I'm throwing, do I have to start from the same place? Or is kind of the whole width of the ice available to me? Can I start off to the right a few feet such that I can throw and cram it in a little more?
ANNE BARTHEL: No, you can't. At each end of the ice you have something that looks kind of like a starting block, and we call it the hack. Every player has to start from the hack. If you're right-handed, you have to put your right foot into the left one of the hacks, and then if you're left-handed you can put it in the other one. There are two of them, one for the right-handed players, one for the left-handed players.
LEE STITZEL: So then could I, and if I could, would it be an advantage to sort of come out of those not straight down the ice, such that I can create an angle to work with?
ANNE BARTHEL: Right. That's what the skip, who is standing in the back, will place their target for. The target for the person to throw is always a little bit off to the side from where you actually want the rock to end up, because depending on the ice and depending on the stone, you're going to get a couple of feet of curl. If you put your broom in the center and then I turn it, let's say clockwise, my rock is not going to end up in the center. Usually it's going to end up a little bit over to the side.
LEE STITZEL: Got it. So that's the strategy that allows the throw and the sweeping combined to create the curling. Actually, I didn't really need sweepers if we're just going to throw and bounce people's stones out one at a time, like the strategy that I mentioned first, right?
ANNE BARTHEL: Well, you need your sweepers maybe a little bit, because what the sweeping also does is generally it takes away a little bit of that curl. The more you sweep, the straighter the rock is going to run. Sometimes you need your sweepers because maybe the person who threw it made a little bit of a mistake. Compared to something like chess, and curling is often called chess on ice, compared to chess we don't have perfect execution of our strategy. You have the ice, you have the player, and sometimes maybe I wobble a little bit when I was throwing my stone, or maybe I was just a little bit off the target. By sweeping, they can try to keep it from making too much of a curve. They can't make it do more of a curve generally, not with the current brooms. With the super brooms they could make it do more of a curve, but those have been outlawed again. So you need the sweepers even on those fast ones.
LEE STITZEL: That's very interesting. So the super brooms were allowing us to both flatten that out, make it straighter, and make it curl more. Typically with whatever the regulation brooms are now, I throw, I can impart a certain amount of curl to it, it has a natural curl, and all those sweepers can do is straighten it out pretty much?
ANNE BARTHEL: Yeah. Except for the very end. There's kind of this weird, and I don't know exactly the physics about this, but at the very end when the rock gets really slow, then sometimes by sweeping a lot you can make it dig in and it just does a really strong turn. But generally, yeah, you couldn't make it curl more.
LEE STITZEL: I've never seen that, but that sounds really cool.
ANNE BARTHEL: It's pretty cool, yeah.
LEE STITZEL: So we've talked about the game itself, the strategy, the players, whatnot. What does sort of day-to-day play look like? Not our World Games, not our Olympics. Do you have leagues and tournaments? How is that structured?
ANNE BARTHEL: For the recreational curler, generally what play will look like is that they go to their curling club once a week, or maybe twice a week depending on how often those curling clubs meet. You're going to have a league within your club. You just have club members form teams, and you're going to play other teams from your club. Then also you have tournaments where people travel to different curling clubs, and then you're going to be playing against teams from other clubs as well. In the U.S. we call those tournaments bonspiels. Don't ask me why. Everybody assumes it's a German word, but as a German I can say no. I mean, the word 'Spiel,' that's 'game' in German, so I can see some sort of connection to German, but it's not a word that we would use in German. We just call it a tournament.
LEE STITZEL: So somebody really mangled some German word a long time ago coming over to America, and it's just lost all its meaning.
ANNE BARTHEL: Yeah, and it just kind of stuck. So curlers in the U.S., you will always hear them talking about, 'Oh, I'm going to a bonspiel.' Well, they're going to a tournament. Those are generally on weekends. They start on a Friday usually, and then Saturday, Sunday afternoon is when they conclude, so that everybody has time to get back home afterwards.
LEE STITZEL: When we think of curling, we think of the Canadian team a lot. You're obviously here representing the Germans, and then of course there was a big stir about the American team in the previous Olympics. Any idea where curling got its start? Is it originally a German sport?
ANNE BARTHEL: No, absolutely Scottish.
LEE STITZEL: Oh, that means from medieval Scotland?
ANNE BARTHEL: Yeah.
LEE STITZEL: Right. If anybody's going to come up with a game like this, it's going to be the Scots.
ANNE BARTHEL: Well, the stones are there.
LEE STITZEL: The stones are there, that's right.
ANNE BARTHEL: So it was in medieval Scotland, I think in like the 1500s or something like that, people first for whatever reason started sliding big rocks down a sheet of ice, and it kind of went from there.
LEE STITZEL: Well, that makes some sense, right? They've got the fjords there and that kind of thing, the natural place for them to play.
ANNE BARTHEL: Yeah. And then the Scots brought it to Canada. The Scottish immigrants to Canada brought the game there, and that's when it really, really started gaining popularity. Canada is the country with the most curlers in the world. The Canadians then kind of brought it back, I think, to Europe after World War II. I remember playing in a club in Germany, for example, that was founded by Canadians that were stationed in that area.
LEE STITZEL: So how did you get your start? Since we're talking about league play, tournaments, whatnot, how did you find curling?
ANNE BARTHEL: How did I find curling? Curling found me. My friend in elementary school, her father used to curl. I don't know how he got started. He just kind of somehow was curling. She wanted to curl because that's what her dad had been doing, and so he told her that she needed to find three teammates to start a team. She just asked her friends, and one day at school she asked me, 'Do you want to be on my curling team?' And I said yes. I went home and told my parents I was going to be on this curling team. 'What is that, by the way?' Then my parents were trying to explain it to me because they had heard about it, and yeah, so then I started.
LEE STITZEL: You're lucky your friend didn't ask you to play ice hockey or something. You know, you've been playing a contact sport. That could have been really bad for you.
ANNE BARTHEL: But no, it worked out. My hometown happens to be one of the towns in Germany that has a curling club, because we don't have terribly many. They're mostly located in southern Germany. If your town doesn't happen to be one that has a curling club, well then how are you going to start? That's like right here. We don't have a curling club anywhere here in the Texas Panhandle. I think the closest clubs would be in Dallas and in Oklahoma City, just to give you an idea.
LEE STITZEL: Yeah. I'm familiar with there being some curling in Oklahoma. I did my Ph.D. at the University of Oklahoma, and I know there's an ice rink that's actually, of course, for hockey, and then the curling team meets there. So if you've got Oklahoma City, Dallas, we're only talking cities of that size and up. Dallas is as big as it gets almost, but like Oklahoma City and up.
ANNE BARTHEL: Right. If you go toward the more northern states in the United States, if you go to Minnesota or Wisconsin, for example, they have lots of curling clubs. There you will have curling clubs even in small towns. They might not be big, they might only have two sheets of ice, but you're going to find a lot of curling clubs up there.
LEE STITZEL: So really quickly, I'm going to detour us just a little bit. Talk about the connection between hockey and curling. Do those two sports fit well together? Are they kind of accepting of each other? I guess hockey's probably slightly larger here in the U.S. Is that how clubs get started, that they typically start on the ice of a hockey team?
ANNE BARTHEL: Usually if somebody wants to start a curling club, what you would try to do is find a hockey rink and see if you could rent some ice time from the hockey teams. The thing is, our ice is slightly different for curling than for hockey. Anybody who's seen hockey knows that the Zamboni comes out after a while and they run the Zamboni over the ice to kind of repair the scrape marks off the skates. For curling, ideally what you would do is not run a Zamboni over the ice, because if you imagine the Zamboni doing laps, you're going to have areas where the ice is going to be slightly higher, you're going to have areas where it's going to be slightly lower. The blade of the Zamboni, when they scrape off that top layer of water, might not be perfectly even. In curling, if the ice is not perfectly even, your rocks are going to start doing funny things. So in curling what you want to do really is flood the ice rink. Of course you can't do that if you're playing on hockey ice because it takes too long. If you had to flood the ice rink every time after there was a hockey game to prepare for curling, I mean, it's impossible. Usually in the U.S. we call them arena curlers. Those are the ones who play in hockey arenas, and they just kind of play on ice that's not ideal. Then you have the other clubs, and those are called dedicated curling clubs. Those are clubs that have their own curling ice. Nobody is going to be skating on that ice, nobody is going to be playing hockey on that ice. It's just for curling.
LEE STITZEL: So you've played a little bit here in the U.S. Do you have experience with dedicated or arena ice?
ANNE BARTHEL: When I played in the U.S., that was when I was at the University of Kansas. I went to Kansas City, to the Kansas City Curling Club, and they were playing on arena ice as well. There were two different ice rinks in the Kansas City area during the time when I was there.
LEE STITZEL: What's your experience like going from an arena situation to a tournament where you're almost certain to play on a dedicated surface?
ANNE BARTHEL: It's always so much fun because all of a sudden the ice is not doing crazy things. I don't want to say it's easier, because there are certain skills that you can't really develop on arena ice. On arena ice you're constantly fighting the ice a little bit more, so sometimes you don't focus on some of the skills of just playing a solid shot because you're always trying to trick the ice. So an arena curler is not always necessarily going to do better on dedicated ice, but it's fun if you go from arena ice to dedicated ice because you don't have those funny ridges or bumps in the ice that you just can't get over. Sometimes on arena ice you're going to have spots on the ice that you just can't reach. So it's sometimes really funny if somebody accidentally bumps a rock over there, you know, you hit your opponent's rock and bump it over there, and then the other team tries to get it out. It turns out you can't get there because the Zamboni left a ridge, and you just can't get your rock over that ridge when you play it.
LEE STITZEL: Talk to us a little bit about tournaments. Is there money in the tournaments? Are you playing only for pride? I'm assuming that's different in the U.S. versus Canada versus Germany. Can you talk about that a little bit?
ANNE BARTHEL: I would say there are different levels of tournaments. If a recreational curler wants to sign up for a tournament, it'll cost you an entry fee to go to that tournament, but that's usually to help the hosting club rent the ice, because they're supplying the ice for you. Especially in the U.S., there's usually a lot of hospitality involved. They're going to provide food for you at the ice rink throughout the entire weekend. There's some entertainment, programs like a raffle or stuff like that. But usually it's just for pride and there's no money involved. Then there are also higher-level tournaments. They call them in the U.S. cashspiels, again the word spiel, and there you can actually win prize money.
LEE STITZEL: I'm assuming that means the entry fee is going to be a little bit higher and not everybody can enter those tournaments, right?
ANNE BARTHEL: I think they're going to be a little bit more selective in terms of who can play there. If I'm a no-name team coming from Oklahoma City, I might have a hard time getting into the prestigious cashspiels. But if I'm a team that's known in United States curling circles, like, oh, those guys play at national championships, then yeah, you might get in and you can win some money.
LEE STITZEL: Are those invitationals, or do you have qualifiers for that kind of tournament?
ANNE BARTHEL: I think they're generally more invitationals. They either send you an invite, like, 'Hey, we have this tournament, would you like to come?' Or sometimes you might say, 'We would like to, if you have a spot open, we would like a spot,' and then they can decide who they give the spot to.
LEE STITZEL: Two questions then. Question number one is, you mentioned that the tournament is a weekend. Talk to us about how long it takes to play a tournament. Are we talking Saturday, Sunday?
ANNE BARTHEL: Usually play starts on Friday. On your average recreational tournament, the first game is going to be Friday afternoon, Friday evening, and then you're going to have maybe two games, maybe three if they have a really tight schedule, on Saturday. Then generally the final rounds are going to be on Sunday morning. Oftentimes if your team's not doing too well, you might be out by Saturday night. They often have a format they call triple knockout or something like that. That means you have three games guaranteed, but if you lose all three of them then you're out. If you happen to win somewhere along that road, then you might qualify for an additional game.
LEE STITZEL: What are the sizes of tournaments, sort of for a recreational versus a cash-invitational type tournament?
ANNE BARTHEL: I think it always depends on the hosting club and how many sheets of ice they have. I've been to curling clubs that have two sheets of ice, so obviously they're going to have to limit the number of teams that play in that tournament because they can only have four teams on the ice at any given time. If you have ice rinks that have eight sheets of ice, which they have in some of the bigger curling clubs, then you can have a whole bunch of teams. You might have tournaments that are 16 teams, or even smaller than that, and you might have tournaments that have 40 teams.
LEE STITZEL: Any idea what the most prestigious tournament in the U.S. is?
ANNE BARTHEL: I'm not sure what the most prestigious one is. I think they have a couple, like in St. Paul, that are pretty well known, but I'm not sure.
LEE STITZEL: So that Twin Cities curling tournament is probably something like that.
ANNE BARTHEL: Yeah.
LEE STITZEL: Disclaimer for the listeners, I don't know anything about curling, so I was just making a joke. The other thing that I wanted to ask you was, you talked a little bit about tournament play at the recreational level. One of the things we want to kind of talk about next is amateurism and the Olympics and that type of thing. Anybody out there making a good chunk of money? Any idea what these cash payouts at these tournaments are?
ANNE BARTHEL: I can't say I've ever played in any of those really big ones, the really big invitationals where you can win a lot of money. I think the most my team ever won at a tournament was like 200 euros, which we were ecstatic about because everybody got 50 euros back at the end of the trip. But I've seen online that the purse of some of those tournaments is around $100,000. I'm not 100 percent sure if that posting was in Canadian dollars or in U.S. dollars. That was a little bit unclear.
LEE STITZEL: That's a U.S. tournament?
ANNE BARTHEL: I think it was a U.S. tournament that I looked at, but actually, no, it might have been a Canadian one, so it might have been 100,000 Canadian dollars. I think they are trying to create tournaments for the elite curlers that are a little more lucrative, where you can win a little bit more money. But just to give you an idea, the top-earning curling teams in the last couple of years made around $100,000 to $160,000 in terms of prize money.
LEE STITZEL: Per player?
ANNE BARTHEL: No, for the entire team.
LEE STITZEL: Okay, so there's a big difference. Can you make that much playing? I call that a career, right?
ANNE BARTHEL: No, no, no. This is for the entire team. Just as a comparison, the top 200 tennis players in the world make that much or more. The top tennis players make millions of dollars in prize money each year. If you look at somebody like Rafael Nadal, I don't know how many millions he's made in prize money this year already. Curling prize money is not going to be that substantial, and I think if you're a professional curler, you're not going to be able to completely sustain yourself only upon the prize money that you can win. You're going to need some sponsorships and endorsements and stuff like that as well.
LEE STITZEL: So is there such a thing as a professional curler?
ANNE BARTHEL: There are some, mostly in Canada. Canada has teams that are professional curlers, and they have endorsements and they earn money at these cashspiels, and they do that for the time being. You're not going to get rich, I think, being a professional curler, but those people can do it. They don't have a daytime job that they go to. In some other countries they've solved it in a different way. In Germany, for example, and I know some other European countries have a similar model, you have professional curlers through the military.
LEE STITZEL: That's kind of a funny thing.
ANNE BARTHEL: Yeah. You have the Olympic athletes who join the military, and they're kind of in a special group. They're not going to be the ones being sent to the front lines for combat, obviously. Those are people who are going to do basic training, so they kind of know what to do, and then they go off and train for the majority of the year and participate in their competitions, and they get financial support through the military. Then after their season is over, they have to come back in and do a couple of weeks of some basic service in the military.
LEE STITZEL: That strikes me as so strange.
ANNE BARTHEL: I don't know. To me it's a normal thing because I grew up around it. And it's not just curling. It's pretty much all Olympic sports in countries like Germany.
LEE STITZEL: Let's turn just a little bit. We've talked about recreational play, talked about cash invitationals. Talk to us about the big ones, which I think are, we've mentioned Worlds, and of course we all have Olympics in mind. Is there any other big-time, this-is-what-we're-playing-for kind of event?
ANNE BARTHEL: I would say the Olympics are the highest one because it only comes around every four years. Then World Championships happen every year, and sometimes you have continental championships. For example, in Europe you have, every November I believe it is now, the European Championships. I know Asia Pacific has a championship. I don't think North America has its championship because there's just not that many teams. Even with Canada, if Canada gets to field one team and the U.S. gets to field one team, and maybe you're going to have a team from Mexico join, well then you can play out a championship between three nations. Whereas if you go to the European Championships, they already have to divide the field into the A tournament where the actual championship is happening, and then you have to be at the C level because there are so many countries in Europe and a lot of them have curling teams. So you have to qualify up to actually be allowed in the main draw for the championship.
LEE STITZEL: I was imagining a situation where you might have multiple Canadian teams and multiple U.S. teams.
ANNE BARTHEL: That would be an interesting idea, but usually on those international-level tournaments each country gets one team.
LEE STITZEL: Okay, so in the Olympics you have a field of 12 teams, and you can't have two Canadian teams. There's only going to be one Team Canada, one Team U.S.A., which makes sense at the Olympic level. In other sports you get multiple entries per country, right? If you look at bobsledding, for example, you get bobsled Germany one, you get bobsled Germany two, Canada, I don't know.
ANNE BARTHEL: In curling, no. And again, the reason is the tournament takes a long time. Each match takes two and a half hours or a little bit longer. The format they play in the Olympics is a round robin at first. Each team plays every other team, so you start with 11 games. After that you move on to the playoff stage, where it's like a semifinal and then a final. Curling is generally one of those sports that starts at the beginning of the Olympics and lasts until the very end. As a curler, you're going to be busy almost the entire time.
LEE STITZEL: So they can run probably entire bobsled heats in the time it takes one pair of teams to play in curling.
ANNE BARTHEL: Yeah.
LEE STITZEL: That's fascinating. One of the things that's interesting from a sports-economics standpoint is amateurism versus professionalism, especially how that ties in with the Olympics. It sounds like you have a decent amount of world and international-level events. We have some avenues that people could be professionals. How many people that I'm going to watch whenever I turn on the Winter Olympics next time and see curling, are those professionals, those amateurs? Do you have any sense of that?
ANNE BARTHEL: I would say by now the people that you see in the Olympics, most of them are professionals or let's call them semi-professionals. The Canadian teams are going to be mostly professionals. Some of the top European teams, they're going to be pretty much professionals. Then you have some countries where you kind of have a funny gray area in between. In the United States they have a program, I believe it's Dick's Sporting Goods, that hires Olympic athletes, and they can work at Dick's Sporting Goods either in management or on the floor, and they get a very flexible schedule. They're probably only working part-time during a good chunk of their season, but they give them the flexibility that they can be gone for weeks at a time if they have to go to the Olympics, to World Championships, or if they have tournaments on the weekend. Imagine a regular employer if I tell them, well, my tournament is from Friday to Sunday, so I'm going to need Thursday off to travel, and to be competitive at the international level I'm going to have to be going to tournaments two or three weekends out of the month from September, that's when the competitive season starts, until maybe March. So half the year I'm going to be gone almost half the workweek. Some employers are very flexible, but I think that level of flexibility is a lot to ask for a lot of employers. For that reason, the U.S. has a couple of these programs where people can work part-time. I would call those semi-professionals because they still have a job, but they don't work a 40-hour workweek necessarily every week.
LEE STITZEL: You mentioned that some of the Canadian teams get endorsements. You mentioned top-level tennis players. My guess would be, and I don't know these numbers off the top of my head, your top-level tennis players probably make about as much endorsing things as they do winning purses. That's very common in other sports. Basketball, for example, somebody's contract is $30 million a year, but he's also making $30 million from Gatorade this year. Some of those are pretty prominent. What's the endorsement money like in curling?
ANNE BARTHEL: A lot less than in those other sports that you just mentioned. I don't really have a good sense of how much, but I know that the major sporting brands, you don't see Nike sponsoring curlers, or you don't see the big companies that you would usually associate with sports necessarily getting into curling. If you watch curling, oftentimes the brands that you see on the uniforms that the players wear, I don't even know what this is. There are some brands, but there are smaller sponsors.
LEE STITZEL: So we've talked about who makes the stones. Who makes the brooms?
ANNE BARTHEL: There are a couple of companies that make them, a couple of different brands that make the brooms. I can think of like two or three maybe that are commonly used.
LEE STITZEL: Are they brands that we would recognize? I'm sure a lot of the endorsements that top-level tennis players get, they probably have entire programs for the racket- and shoe-making companies themselves. I'm sure somebody like Nadal is worth his weight in gold in terms of people therefore buying whatever brand of racket he's using. He's probably worth his weight in gold when it comes to selling rackets. Do you have a similar sort of, 'Well, I only play with Head rackets,' when it comes to curling?
ANNE BARTHEL: People definitely have their preferences. You have, like, the two main brands I can think of are BalancePlus and Goldline in curling. So you have some teams that are going to be playing with BalancePlus equipment, and then you're going to have the Goldline people.
LEE STITZEL: Do you play with one?
ANNE BARTHEL: I think I had a BalancePlus broom, and at some point I also had shoes from them. But I was never really like, 'Oh, this is the only brand I'm going to use.' I've had my fair share of different brooms and shoes.
LEE STITZEL: So why is it then that people get into curling and play it at the highest level?
ANNE BARTHEL: I think for a lot of people, you get involved in a sport, and if in your sport the Olympics is kind of the pinnacle of the sport, the highest achievement you could have, then that's kind of what you're going to be striving toward. It's maybe still kind of that romantic idea of winning an Olympic medal, of just kind of how cool that would be. I don't know. When I started curling, I never, ever thought that would possibly be a way that I could be making money doing this. I was always aware that this was going to be a hobby. Of course, if you look at my career, you can tell that at some point my professional career became more important than my curling career. I very clearly made that choice, that I said I'm not going to go to the place where I can have the best curling career. I am going to go to the place where I can develop my professional career the most. I obviously made that choice. You might have other people who can combine it a little bit better, where it's like, okay, I can work toward my professional career, but I can also still be very competitive at curling.
LEE STITZEL: I want to turn now to a really classic sports-economics idea, which is competitive balance. Competitive balance is the idea of how competitive, how close, how many different teams. There's two different types of competitive balance. One is what we call within-season competitive balance. Explaining that to somebody, and I'm using classic American sports, that would be what your win percentages look like throughout a league. If you have a highly balanced within-season competitive balance, that means a whole bunch of teams, many of the teams in the league, will be huddled around .500 because sort of any given Sunday, any team can win. A very dispersed league would be there are some teams who have really terrible records and some teams who have really, really good records, and they're sort of spread out. You literally can think about dispersion of those. What does within-season competitive balance look like for curling? How competitive is curling?
ANNE BARTHEL: For one, you don't necessarily play league play as much, right? Here you would have to look at competitive balance across tournaments. I guess you're going to have lots of different teams winning tournaments simply because not everybody is going to be at the same tournament at the same time all the time. Teams can kind of avoid each other also a little bit if they want to say, 'Okay, team so-and-so is going to that tournament this weekend. I'm going to go to the other one.' So you don't necessarily have to play them all the time. If you look at the World Championships from year to year, I mean, that's not within-season, I guess.
LEE STITZEL: That's already the next thing that I'm going to ask you, what we call between-season competitive balance. You could just literally think about championships. What's the frequency and concentration of championships? We could have a league where every year the within-season competitive balance is very high, so many of the teams are huddled around .500. It's hard to be a team that wins 70-plus percent of your games. Baseball is a good example of this, as opposed to basketball where we have a much wider spread. We have some teams winning almost every game during the regular season, and then you have some teams who win ten games in an 82-game schedule. So that could be good or bad within-season competitive balance, but your between-season competitive balance can be really good, where we just have a different champion every time, or you could have tightly packed within-season competitive balance but the same teams keep emerging as champions. So maybe the within-season kind of doesn't make sense. Talk to us a little bit about the between-season. Do we have the same teams winning Worlds, the same team winning Olympics?
ANNE BARTHEL: The answer, the typical economist's answer, is it depends. If you look at some countries, what you're going to see is that it's going to be the same team that's going to be representing country X on the world stage year after year. To give you one example, look at Sweden. They've been very, very successful on both the women's and the men's side, but if you look at the last I don't know how many years, it's always been the same team that represents Sweden at the world stage, at European Championships, at World Championships, or at the Olympics. Also Germany. I know a little bit more about how they choose their team and who represents them, just based on the fact that I used to curl there. They also have had the same team representing Germany for the last, I want to say five years, or pretty much the same team. Some people have quit, new players have come on, but the core, I think, of that team is still the same. Part of the reason for that is how countries select their national team. In a country like Germany where you only have a handful of competitive teams, it's a little risky to say we're just going to have a national championship and then we're going to send whoever wins that championship to the World Championships, because what could happen with that is that you just have one team that's really the worst out of the five, but just by pure chance they're going to be the best team during that one week when they play the German championship, and then they go on to Worlds, whereas another team would be much more consistent. They are technically the better team; they just had an off weekend that one weekend. If you're a country like Canada, where you have so many curlers and you have so many great teams, you have a much bigger balance between the teams. There you can do that pretty easily. You just have Canadian Championships, and whoever is going to win the Canadian championship has a chance at the world level. So I think in smaller countries like Germany, also Sweden, they don't have as many teams, or Scotland even, they generally will have kind of a designated national team. That team, even prior to the championships, they are already predetermined to be going, and they get a lot of the support from the federation. They are the ones who are the professionals. They will go to a lot of international tournaments. Which, of course, over time doesn't help to grow a whole bunch of new competitive teams, because if it's already set in stone who is going to be going to the World Championships, well, if I'm one of the other teams, what's really my incentive? If I can't earn money, if I'm not going to get rich doing it, and if I really don't have a good chance of making it to Worlds, then what am I playing for? So I think in some of those countries, if you have your chosen national team, it has made it even more concentrated, that you just have that one top team and not much else. Whereas in a country like Canada, you naturally have a large pool, but also everybody feels like in any given year it could be us. I think that kind of helps.
LEE STITZEL: When you see some sports teams that play head-to-head, or players that play head-to-head, the gap in skill is more or less predictive of the outcome. If I'm whatever top-level tennis player and I play a second-tier player, chances are I'm going to win every time. There are very few upsets in that setting. But you have a good NFL team play a sort of second-tier NFL team, there'll be a fair amount of, scare quotes, 'upsets' in that setting. What's that like in curling? If you're the better team, are you just winning every match against a second-rate team, or is it fairly balanced?
ANNE BARTHEL: If it's a really stark difference in ability, then yes, you should win every time. If you sent me right now on the ice with a team and had me play against the world champions, I'm not going to stand a chance. But at the world level, even the team that wins the championship could lose to some of the other teams that will finish closer toward the bottom of the table, because once you get to that 12-team field at the world level, those are all going to be pretty tightly packed. Yes, there are always those countries that are more likely than others to make it into the playoffs and win the medals, but it could also be that one of them just has a bad week and it's just not going to work out for them. I think at the last Olympics, on the women's side, Canada didn't make the playoffs, if I remember correctly. It was a big shocker. They were a great team. They should usually easily make the playoffs, but they just had a bad week and they didn't.
LEE STITZEL: So you can have an entire week worth of bad performances?
ANNE BARTHEL: I feel like curling is a very psychological game. It's a mental game. It's like shooting free throws in some sense. There's nobody in your face who is distracting you from your shot. It's really just you against your mind at that moment. I think once things start not working in your favor, you start thinking a little bit more, and it's, 'Oh, but we have to win this one,' or, 'If we lose one, then we're in a really bad position. We have to win.' In curling, you don't have much to distract you from those thoughts if you don't know how to deal with it. So I think it's easy, if you have a rough first game and maybe a rough second game of the tournament, it's easier to get into this downward spiral where it's really hard to get out of. Whereas if you start out great, then you're like, 'Oh, everything's perfect,' and you just don't think much about what's going on because all these players are good. All these players are great players. I would expect all of them to be able to make certain shots every single time, but they don't. It's the same reason why a basketball player who should be hitting that free throw every single time at the end of the game all of a sudden misses it. It's kind of the same idea.
LEE STITZEL: Are there star-level players that are sort of set apart from everyone else? Is there a LeBron James of curling, or do we kind of not have a deep enough pool for somebody to step out that way?
ANNE BARTHEL: I don't think you have something exactly like a LeBron James, but there are definitely elite players that people will be like, okay, those are fantastic players, that people in the curling world would recognize.
LEE STITZEL: I kind of want to bring this in for a landing here. What I want you to send us off with is just an overview of how you see the state of curling, the trends. Is it getting more popular? Is it growing? Is it going to be the most popular sport in the world in 2030?
ANNE BARTHEL: Probably not. It's probably not going to be the most popular sport in the world in 2030, and I'm honestly okay with that. I don't mind curling being a little bit of a niche sport. But I do think that the Olympics have helped bring curling a little bit more into the spotlight, that more people now know about it. If you look at curling clubs across the U.S., for example, you always see a little bit of an uptick in membership around the Olympics. Unfortunately, that usually fizzles out a couple of years later. So I don't know. There might be a slight positive trend, but it's not like curling has exploded in any way, shape, or form. Maybe after the win of the men's team in the last Olympics that will change. We'll see. But I just hope that more and more people across the U.S. get the opportunity to try it. There are definitely more curling clubs now than there used to be in the past. It used to be very concentrated in the north, like I said, Minnesota, Wisconsin. Now we have clubs in Oklahoma City, there are clubs in Dallas, I think Austin has one, Houston I believe has one. So even in the warm-weather states we're seeing more and more clubs spring up, so more people will have the opportunity to try it.
LEE STITZEL: My guest today has been Dr. Anne Barthel. Anne, thank you for joining us on the EconBuff.
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