Maybe, but I kinda doubt it. I don’t think you need to know anything about your teammates to sweep effectively, especially since the sweepers generally aren’t even the ones deciding when & how hard to sweep. I mean, I’m sure it *helps *a team to have played together for a long time, but I’d rather have the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th best shot-makers in the country (with a couple months to practice together) than the 1st, 4th, 9th, and 17th best (with a few years to practice together), and it’s not close.
Oh Yuna Kim, that was incredible. I could watch her short program another sixteen times and not tire of it. She and Kostner were incredible. And Ashley Wagner can stop with the boasting and get lost.
I’m with Robot Arm. When you play together you know what kind of shot works for the other person. You know whether she prefers the in-turn, or out-turn. You know how well she can reliably place a guard just where you need it. You know if she can make the raised takeout, or maybe it would be safer to just peel one this shot, etc. etc.
No, teams need to play together and learn to curl within their own limitations and to exploit their individual strengths.
At the Olympic level, I don’t know, but the sweepers are in the best position to judge the speed (curlers would say “weight”) of the stone. They’re trying to sweep the stone to the correct distance. The skip is in position to judge the line, and calls the sweepers on or off to delay the curl and affect the line.
You also need different skills at different positions. The lead typically throws guards and tap-backs. The fast takeouts don’t happen until later in the end. If you were going to have tryouts for the best individual shooters, you’d still want to find the right skills for each position.
The bronze medalist, Nick Goepper, grew up here in my Indiana neighborhood and learned to ski at our very modest skiing facility Perfect North Slopes. There’s been banners and signs people have put up all over the neighborhood. He was on Letterman too!
Nah, I’m not buying that the ability to throw a guard is different enough from the ability to throw a draw to warrant assembling a team of specialists.
As for learning each others’ strengths and preferences, sure, I’d rather have long-time teammates than a group that had never played together. But how long could it really take to get a good idea of your team’s tendencies? The Olympic team could practice together all the time, intermittently, like the national teams in soccer*. Besides, it’s not like the players don’t get together and agree on a plan before each shot. It would be different if the games had to go in silence.
*–> And, of course, teamwork and chemistry is much more important in soccer than curling, but they all choose to go with teams of all-stars.
Except they all have day jobs. They’re not professional members of a sports union or anything.
How do you propose that a skip in Ottawa could intermittently practice with a skip in Winnipeg, while holding auditions for 3rds from Vancouver and St. John’s, and seconds from Trois-Rivières and Edmonton?
Vic Wild, who won the gold in parallel snow board slalom, is an American skating for Russia. He couldn’t get enough funding to afford to train in the US and Russia offered him money and a job. He was dating a Russian girl anyway, so they got married, he got Russian citizen, and has now won gold for them. His wife got bronze in the women’s event.
Not so. The qualification for the Olympics is not just last year’s winner of the Brier (for men) or the Scotties (for women). It’s a separate tournament, the Canadian Olympic trials, that allows a number of teams to compete, based on their standings in different competitions over the past three years. The top six teams (for men and women) go directly to the trials. The next 12 teams compete in the pre-trials, with only the top 2 advancing to the Trials.
For instance, the Jennifer Jones rink qualified for the Olympic Trials because she won the 2011 Canada Cup. Her team came in second in the 2013 Scotties.
Brad Jacobs won the 2013 Brier, but that wasn’t enough to give him a berth in the Trials. It only earned him a berth in the Pre-trials tournament, where he performed well enough to advance to the Trials, which he then won.
[Quote=RickJay]
It is, if you think about it, a singularly bizarre system that effectively guarantees Canada will not actually send its very best curlers to the Olympics; it’ll probably send at least one of the best curlers, most likely the best (or close to the best) skip, but it’s a near-certainly better curlers were left at home.
[/QUOTE]
Odd, then, that such a “bizarre” system has produced such good results. Since curling was re-instated as an Olympic sport in 1998, Canada is the only country which has won a medal in each of the Olympics, for both the men and women teams.
Men: silver in 1998 and 2002; gold in 2006 and 2010.
Women: gold in 1998, bronze in 2002 and 2006, silver in 2010.
In short, the curling selection process is aimed at sending the best teams to the Olympics, and has been very successful.
By contrast, for the same four Olympic cycles, the Canadian men’s hockey team, selected by committee to be Canada’s best players, but not necessarily the best team, has had mixed success: gold twice, in 2002 and 2010, but shut out of the medals entirely twice, in 1998 and 2006.
(Women’s hockey is less clear-cut, because of the Canada-US dominance, but I note that the women’s team plays together as a team in the year leading up to the Olympics, unlike the men’s team.)
Which is the better way to choose a team for a team sport? The curling selection process seems better, judging by medal count.
It’s patently obvious. Soccer is a fluid game, with 11 men needing to be able to act in unison, on the fly. You need to have a feel for how your teammates like to time their runs and position themselves, because you can’t pause the game before every action to confer and agree upon a plan, which is exactly what happens before each shot in curling.
“Let’s draw the stone to here, and that will set up x on our next rock.”
“Hmmm, I’m actually not so comfortable throwing x.”
“Oh, ok, let’s do y instead, then.”
Curling is all set-pieces. Teamwork in curling is therefore much more akin to teamwork in, say, baseball. Sure, all things being equal it’s better to know your teammates inside & out, but a team of all-stars who’ve just met will, on balance, beat the shit out of the Boston Red Sox, no matter how long the Sox have been playing together.
Nor is it fair to contrast Canada’s Olympic curling results with their hockey results. Curling is much more popular in Canada than in any other country, whereas hockey talent is distributed throughout the globe more equally. China could have an inefficient method for picking their table tennis representatives and still dominate the Olympics, for instance.
In another thread, it was noted that Canada had 1.25 million participants in organized curling. If that’s so, then I don’t see how Scotland (pop. just over 5 mil) or Sweden (just under 10 mil) could top that in sheer numbers. Perhaps in percentage of population.
