Curling

A neophyte to curling I am not, but I have to admit: if you told me back in the day that I'd be watching a Chinese team made of up ex-speedskaters coached by a former printer from Montreal competing in a major competition, I would have had another rye and coke and left it at that.

It's true I used to think there were just three things you needed to know to curl: in-turn, out-turn ... and the identity of the local Labatt's representative.

But if you want somebody to make fun of curling, look elsewhere. To me, it's no less an Olympic sport than women's hockey, which is essentially an intramural competition between the same group of Canadian and U.S. women, who between them determine who wins the gold medal by a score of 3-2. And like baseball, curling really doesn't care if non-fans like it or not. And even if you leave it for some other sport, it will wait for you to return when you're, um, more mature. All will be forgiven.

Canada will be a big target in curling at the Vancouver Olympics, and nine of the rinks at the men's Capital One Grand Slam of Curling, going on this week at the Hershey Centre, have qualified for the Games already including Fengchun Wang's team from China.

Last year in Vernon, B.C., it was the Chinese women's team skipped by Bingyu (Betty) Wang that stole the hearts of the crowd before losing in the finals. Can the Chinese men become an item in Vancouver?

They have some work to do, it appears. Wang's team lost 4-2 to Randy Ferbey on Wednesday and didn't throw their final rock of the seventh end because they ran out of time, having used more than the 33-minutes allotted for shot-making. According to organizers, it's never happened in a world tour event.

After that game, the sport's secretary-general Li Dong Yan told them: "You should just go home right now." Yikes. They made their third lineup change since September immediately after that game and lost 8-4 to Kevin Martin before beating Thomas Dufour of France 8-5, stealing five points after being down 5-1 after three ends. "Good for confidence," Wang acknowledged later.

"They got off the ice [Wednesday] and it was like nothing happened, like ‘Okay, we'll play tomorrow,'." said the Chinese coach Dan Rafael. "I'm like, ‘don't you understand? This is the biggest [grand slam] in the world? It's like playing Wimbledon.' Then when the boss got involved and threatened to send them home, I was like, uh, no."

Wang's rink lives in Edmonton and trains in nearby Leduc under the guidance of Rafael, a 48-year-old curler out of Lachine, Que., who parlayed a coaching job at a high-performance centre in Boucherville and a job as the French coach into a contract to be the coach of the Chinese national teams in September, 2007.

It is a myth, Rafael says, that the Chinese teams are all "appointed" by the government - although it is true that all of the members of the men's team are speedskaters and the women's team all are from the northern city of Harbin. It is also true that the women's team are all gymnasts.

Rafael says the Chinese women are much more advanced than the men, which he says is due to the fact the Chinese skip and their Chinese coach, Tan Weidong, speak English.

"Technically the men are good," Rafael said. "But they just throw the rock and react. If you look at all the other teams, they throw the rock softly and control it. These guys just throw it and hope it curls and if it curls so much they'll start sweeping. A lot of Asian countries are like that, they haven't refined the sense of ‘we're the boss, not the rock.' With them, it's the ice, it's the rock, it's whatever."

They certainly seem a simpatico group. After Wednesday's fiasco, organizers made sure they had a large digital clock that they moved around to the sheet on which the Chinese were competing. The time on every other sheet was kept by minute timers worn on the chest.

"Didn't run out of time today, huh, Charlie?" asked Norwegian second Christoffer Svae as he walked off the ice following the third draw, stopping to pat Wang on the shoulder. Both men laughed.

Charlie is Wang's nickname but curlers being curlers they've started to call him Chuck. "He came up to me the other day and said, ‘Dan, what is ‘Chuck?'." Rafael said. "I told him it was okay."

Hey, when your nickname has a nickname, you're probably on the right track. All the way to Vancouver.