Olympics|Beijing Got All Ready for Olympic Curling. But About the Ice …
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The ice makers of Olympic curling are part physicist, part meteorologist, part engineer. They know that creating a stage for a world-class event is all about the process.
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By Rick Rojas
Photographs by Gabriela Bhaskar
See our coverage of the Winter Olympics Closing Ceremony here.
BEIJING — Ice might just seem to be ice.
But not in curling.
The frozen sheets created for elite competitions like the Olympics are the product of a painstaking process under the direction of a team of specialists hewing to the particular demands of ensuring a heavy stone, aided by the furious sweeping of a broom, glides gracefully down a track.
Even in the best of conditions, in facilities constructed for the sport, the job is a stressful one. In Beijing, it has been a whole other story.
The world’s experts on creating ice worthy of Olympic-class curling were handed a challenge more daunting than anything they had faced: Turn an Olympic-size swimming pool in the National Aquatics Center into lanes of ice ready for the world’s best curlers.
“It’s never really been done before,” said Hans R. Wuthrich, the chief ice technician for curling at the Beijing Games, his fourth Olympics and just one of many elite competitions in his decades-long career.
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