The sport of curling is based on three fundamental things: ice, rocks, and a broom. While wrestling has it and every other modern sport beat by many millennia, curling, with its roots in Medieval England, predates most anything else practiced regularly in Canada or elsewhere. In the painting below, you can clearly see some Flemish peasants scooting rocks around on some ice, aka curling. It hasn't changed much.
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As it turns out, some five centuries after its probable debut, curling is finally colliding with technology—and many rock-scooters aren't too happy about it.How could technology possibly insert itself into a sport consisting of sliding literal rocks at other literal rocks? Brooms, the only aspect of curling that might be considered to be technology in the first place. Curlers scoot their stones as a team, with one doing the actual scooting and a couple more sliding ahead of the stone and sweeping it a path forward. Yes, curling is largely a sport of cleaning stuff.Curling brooms have evolved over time, trading straw for, eventually, synthetic fabric—but only now has a material emerged to challenge the very soul of the sport. This is, according to a recent story in the New York Times, a technology known as directional fabric. An extreme example can be seen below:
As you can see, the sweeper is able to make the rock change direction dramatically (compared to a normal curling broom). Most curlers seem to agree that this isn't much in the spirit of curling and a bunch of pros signed a pledge to not use the brooms, while the World Curling Federation issued new rules restricting the sorts of brooms that can be used in official curling events (thus protecting the Olympics). A ban on waterproof fabrics seems to be the big one.The Times reports
Pete Fenson, a bronze medalist for the United States at the 2006 Turin Games, learned the game using cornhusk brooms while growing up in northern Minnesota. The new brooms, with carbon fiber shafts, allow curlers to sweep paths for stones, also known as rocks, in such ways that "it almost looks like they're on remote control," said Fenson, who has a sponsorship agreement with BalancePlus. "In the past, players that have the best feel for the game, work the hardest, are in the best shape and understand the game the best—those are the ones who were usually the most successful."
The problem is just the most recent example of general problem in sports as technology threatens to change their very character, from nanotech swimsuits to absolutely everything to do with golf to, yes, even brooms. Brooms!
Should we just welcome it? What's our obligation to history here? Or maybe that's not the right question. It's more so an obligation to the sports themselves, which are naturally dynamic, but still only exist as defined by rules. That's what makes them interesting and worthwhile. An archery competition with shotguns is just a bunch of people blowing holes in stuff.
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