The Art of the Monsterous Bomb

This morning, while watching the Men's world curling championship on www.curltv.com, I saw something worth sharing.

Two years ago, Quebec hosted the Junior World Curling Championships, and we were given the opportunity to play a practice game against Team Sweden to help them warm up before the event. Team Sweden went on to win the worlds that year, obviously because of the good practice game we gave them. The third of that team was Nils Carlsen, who is now skipping the team at this year's Men's worlds.

When we played against them two years ago, the coach of team Sweden was bragging about how Nils has the biggest take-out weight in Europe. Our response? "Oh yeah, well wait till you see Daniel throw". Daniel plays second on my curling team, and has some of the biggest takeout weight that you'll see anywhere. So we had a bit of a "mine's bigger" fight, and eventually agreed that they can both throw pretty ludicrous takeout weight.

So today, I was watching Canada play Denmark on curlTV, when they switched over to show another game between Sweden and the US. Sweden was down by 4 points playing the 9th, needing at least 2 in order to have a chance in the last end. The only shot that Nils possibly had was a blast drag-effect monster catching a piece of a rock that was frozen onto another, driving that onto a sliver of a back rock, spilling them both and counting 2....and even that was a remote possibility.

So he put the broom down and headed down to the hack. He lined up, pulled the rock back, swung the thing waaaaaaaaay up over his head (probably the biggest backswing I've ever seen), launched forward, crooked and unstable but moving FAST, and managed to get the rock off in the right direction, so fast that the sweepers couldn't even follow it. BANG. Rocks fly everywhere! One actually jumped off the sheet onto the carpet. Another smashed into the rock pile behind the house making things fly everywhere. Officials were running around freaking out, checking rocks for damage. Hahaha. They were especially concerned about the rock that was first hit, since it was frozen on another, effectively sandwiched between the shooter and the rock it was frozen on. Sweden only ended up taking 1 point, so they decided to shake hands on that high note.

I know how officials cringe when their precious rocks get jeopardized. I've never seen a rock break in curling, except in the Men With Brooms curling movie... but we still get yelled at often by Curling Quebec officials. I wonder how the American officials spoke to the Swedish team afterwards? I can just see Gwen (an official that comes to our club in Stanstead every year for our Canusa mixed bonspiel) waving her finger at Nils. Hahaha.

Kudos to Nils for representing the big weight shot. There aren't very many teams out there that bother to attempt the impossible MONSTEROUS BOMB when they have nothing else. I look forward to having the chance to play that team again at some point.