A book about curling.

I originally thought that I couldn't write about curling in an understandable way. Nevertheless, I tried. A few months ago, I christened the publication I wrote with my friends, and Czech Television was kind enough to feature a mention of my efforts: video

Below is a sample of a section that seems to give away the point of the story, but it doesn't.

Curling - epilogue

I would never have believed how fascinating a world I would know through something that at first glance seems dull, unexciting, influenced by a number of random factors, and operating in temperatures below ten degrees Celsius. I call it, for short, "cold, boring, cliché", which might even make a pretty decent hashtag (#zimanudaklika).

Cold weather and cold environments have a certain romance to them, though. Something both urgent and heartfelt. Something calm and thoughtful and just as necessarily action-packed. Simply to keep one from simply and stupidly freezing to death, or at least from catching cold. We sometimes talk about how it would be nice to have beach curling as a version of our sport, but we don't really mean it. It wouldn't be curling anymore, it'd be gossip.

Yes, curling is really boring. But only for anyone who hasn't tried to understand it. The magic is in understanding the details, the little technical tricks, the well thought out tactics and the overall strategy. It's about figuring out intentions, which, as in some other sports, are not about the next moment, but are preparation for dealing with a situation that hasn't happened yet. And, moreover, it may never come. The history of curling has its magicians who have turned this activity, game or pastime into a real sport and in recent years have even given it the label of a physically demanding sport. Watching the efforts of the scorers, who cover more than a kilometre per game on extremely slippery ground, while continuously communicating with the rest of the team. Then, with a heart rate of under seventy, they throw a stone that arrives at a spot nearly forty meters away with a precision of a few centimeters. When you consider all this, curling doesn't seem boring.

Luck belongs to sport. So does bad luck. Curling contains a bit more of both than other sports. The ice surface, a natural material that exhibits specific properties that change not only over time but also due to human activity, weather, certain chemical reactions and the laws of physics at work, plays a role. A well thrown stone that hits a small dirt or hair can completely change direction and slow down considerably. But more than that, it can unluckily put the opponent's stone in scoring position, thus completely changing the course of the match. Good curlers, however, take all of these factors into account, have a humility towards the ice as an environment, and calculate risk with an eye to possible luck or bad luck. Plus, even the stones don't all have to be equally fast or spinning. And we're still not talking about a simple coincidence where someone accidentally plays something they didn't intend at all, but it still coincidentally works out. A good curler will apologize to the opponent for such a result, and the opponent will shrug his shoulders and say something to the effect of "that's just curling".

So yes - cold, boring, cliché. But in a good, indeed in the best, loving sense of the word.

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