| • Science | • People | • Locations | • Timeline |
| Contents | ||
Curling has been an official sport in the Winter Olympics since the 1998 Winter Olympic Games (some sources are also including the competition held in 1924 Winter Olympic Games as an official olympic tournament).
The game is currently most firmly established, however, in Canada. The Royal Montreal Curling Club, the first sporting club of any kind in North America, was established in 1807. The first curling club in the United States began in 1832, and the game was introduced to Switzerland and SwedenThe Kingdom of Sweden Konungariket Sverige in Swedish) is a Nordic country in Scandinavia, in Northern Europe. It is bordered by Norway on the west, Finland on the northeast, the Skagerrak and the Kattegat on the southwest, and the Baltic Sea and the Gulf before the end of the nineteenth century.
The curling arena is a sheet of ice 146 feet (45.5 m) long by 14 feet 2 inches (4.3 m) wide, carefully prepared to be absolutely level and to allow the "rocks", as the polished graniteGranite is a common and widely-occurring group of intrusive felsic igneous rocks that form at great depths and pressures under continents. Granite consists of orthoclase and plagioclase feldspars, quartz, hornblende, biotite, muscovite and minor accessory 20 kg stones are called, to glide with as little frictionIn physics, friction is the resistive force that occurs when two surfaces travel along each other when forced together. It causes physical deformation and heat buildup. The frictional force is a function of the force pressing the surfaces together and the as possible. A key part of the preparation is the spraying of fine water droplets on the ice to create what is called pebble. The pebble helps rocks slide faster, and the curling action of rocks changes during a game as the pebble evens out from wear.
On the rink, a 12 foot (3.7 m) wide set of concentric rings, called the house, is painted near each end of the rink. The centre of the house, marked by the junction of two lines which divide the house into quarters, is known as the button or tee. The two lines are the centre line, which is drawn lengthwise down the centre of the sheet, and the tee line, drawn 16 feet (4.9 m) from the backboard and parallel to it. Two other lines, the hoglines, are drawn parallel to each backboard and 37 feet (11.3 m) from it.
The rings which surround the button are defined by their diameter as the four-foot, eight-foot, and twelve-foot rings. They are usually distinguished by colour.
Twelve feet behind the junction of the centre and tee lines, the centre line is crossed at right angles by the hack line. The hack is a device used to provide traction to the curler making a shot; the curler places the foot he or she will push off with in the hack. On indoor rinks there are usually two fixed hacks, rubber-lined holes, one each side of the centre line with the inside edge no more than three inches from the centre line and the front edge on the hack line. A single moveable hack may also be used.