So I ended up watching Olympic curling today while studying and I have to admit that it's pretty interesting once you get past the entire sweeping ice issue. It's more of a thinking game than the other sports. To illustrate, let's look at most of the other sports.
Racing sports: (luge, speed skating, mogals, cross country sking, bobsled, skeleton, etc). Each race looks exactly the same, unless someone crashes. Of course most people who watch these sports are looking for crashes. Outside of crashes, there's very little personality in most of these. Of course, when seconds or less separate a gold metal from no metal, everyone is doing the exact same damn thing anyways.
Figure skating/ice dancing: First off, how many people who don't figure skate can tell the difference between a toeloop, lutz, Salchow, and axel? Additionally, I really don't want to watch stick figure teenagers or emo guys skate. Riverdance style ice skating, on the other hand, would be much more interesting.
So curling. Ok, it's not a strength sport or an endurance sport. It's about as immediately exciting as watching a game of chess. However it's kinda of like chess... but on ice. Do I want to put this rock out in front to block or knock my opponiantes out of the circle? How many rocks can I knock out of the circle? Additional benifit: Womens curling has women who aren't dressed from head to toe in winter gear (like snow boarding, of course I don't really blame snow boarders for what they wear, when they crash they're going to need all the protection they can get) without me wanting to prescribe a cheese burger as a nutritional supplement (cough, figure skating cough).
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