Every 4 years, late at night, I can’t wait to watch one of the most perplexingly captivating sports at the Olympic Winter Games — curling. Curling was one of the original sports in the first Winter Olympics in Chamonix, France, in 1924; interestingly, Great Britain did not receive their gold medal for winning that event until 2006 when the International Olympic Committee officially and retroactively recognized it. The sport became an official event at the XVIII Olympic Winter Games in 1998 in Nagano, Japan.

Like golf, my favorite summer sport, curling has its origin in Scotland. If you ever play golf at Turnberry in Scotland and look out at the Firth of Clyde, you will see an island in the distance that looks almost like a curling stone, for which the first hole of the course is named. It is Ailsa Craig, the small volcanic island where the blue hone microgranite used for most curling stones comes from.

Curling is one of the only Olympic events that we as spectators watch and think we can do at an Olympic level, but we should not be fooled. Watching Olympic curling is like watching macular hole or epiretinal membrane surgery as a first-year ophthalmology resident — it looks so simple. In this issue, we look at the nuances of some of our bread-and-butter retinal surgeries: dislocated lens techniques, scleral buckling, macular hole repair, and epiretinal membrane peeling. What can look so simple can fail or succeed in so many ways. In curling, I have no idea of the things I don’t know or how to win the chess match on ice.

Like the movements we make during retinal surgery, every aspect of the broom stroke in curling matters. Elite players use a SmartBroom with sensors to determine the force and stroke rate to determine a sweeping performance index (SPI). Olympic competitors can have an SPI of over 2,500; my guess is mine would be closer to 250. The SPI has also led to doping in the sport.

I have tried curling at our local curling club. Resembling nothing like the Olympic version, our curling game consisted of drinking beer and having a great time in a heated shack with a regulation ice sheet. I guess that is as far as my Olympic aspirations will take me. RP