Olympic Curling

Is there anyone in America by now who hasn't seen at least a minute of the Winter Olympics curling competition brought to us by those 'plausible live' folks at NBC and NBCSN by now?

Doubles, mixed-doubles, team, there are all kinds of permutations on how the sport can be configured. Even my wife, who eschews all sports broadcasting, by now has unavoidable seen some curling on television.

This is the sport where someone pushes a stone with a handle on top on an ice bocce court toward the logo of the Target stores, is aided by teammates who are either clearing the path so the stone glides faster, or doing something else to slow it down, so that it stops at just the right spot. Whatever that spot is.

The head-on shots of the "skip" who pushes the stone look like someone getting a floor robot started in search of a contact lens. NBC paid A LOT money to broadcast these games, and devotes TONS of hours on two channels to bring us the "action," so I guess we have to expect curling to be televised.

After all, there are fewer sports in the Winter Games than in the Summer Games, so we get curling, a sport that for four years we hear nothing of. Not even the NYT, which publishes some odd sport results in agate type, brings us curling results in non-Olympic years.

And we have even more reason to pay outsize attention to an otherwise obscure sport: someone tested positive for a banned substance!

That's right, both samples came back positive for the presence of meldonium in a Russian curler's bloodstream. Needless to say, the Russians are annoyed at this, and are opening a criminal investigation to how the curler's sample could have come back positive. Tampering is alleged.

It's like that Willie Nelson song by Chris Stapelton:

The postman delivered
A "past due" bill notice
The alarm clock rang two hours late
The garbage man left all the trash
On the sidewalk
And the hinges fell off of the gate
And this morning at breakfast
I spilled all the coffee
And I opened the door on my knee

Oh the last thing I needed
The first thing this morning
Was to have you walk out on me

The drug meldonium first came to light when Maria Sharapova tested positive for it after using it for ten years. Her team didn't get the email that the drug was now added to the no-no list. Sharapova sat out some time.

Now we have Alexander Krushelnytsky, who with his wife took a bronze medal in mixed-doubles curling competition, testing positive for the drug that does have some performance efficacy . It improves the blood supply, and therefore stamina. The reporters for the NYT tell us, curlers "must be accurate with their shots, sometimes down to the centimeter. Hard sweeping can also take a toll over the outcome of a long match."

Amazingly that they still market it, but Geritol is a vitamin tonic sold for years to improve your red blood cell supply. The red cells we know carry the oxygen. Geritol for years sponsored Lawrence Welk, who must have been on something to stay around with all those champagne bubbles while conducting his orchestra for all those fox-trotting grey heads.

So, now even curling enters the circle of tainted sports. Everyone is snickering that a sport like curling can produce a positive test.

It is probably the last sport on earth that I would expect drug testing to turn up a competitor who has ingested a banned substance. Well, maybe chess might really be the last sport.

Footnote to all this:

The South Korean women will sweep for the gold medal. They are being called 'The Garlic Girls' because the region they are from produces a lot of garlic.

The U.S. men have beaten Sweden for the gold medal. They might be called The Beer League. Can baseball-style trading cards be far behind?

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