Background

Curling, which first became an organized sport in Scotland, traces its roots to the 1500s. Historians say paintings from the time depict people sliding rocks across frozen ponds. It took a few centuries for the world to appreciate all that feverish sweeping, though: Curling made its Olympic debut in 1924 — but didn’t return as an official competitive event until the 1998 Winter Games in Nagano, Japan.

Chances are if you didn’t grow up in Canada (where curling is most popular), you may think of the sport as people in funny pants — we’re lookin’ at you, Norwegians —pushing an oversized puck across a skating rink. Au contraire. Curling requires finesse, strategy and serious athleticism — the sweeping can burn up to 500 calories per hour, according to NPR. And because players use their brains as much as their bodies, people call it “chess on ice.”

[ Related: Canadian curlers ready to rock Sochi ]

Allow the USA Women's team to demonstrate. In animal garb:

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Rules

For starters, players aim to guide heavy, granite stones across a sheet of textured ice toward a target area called the house that is split into four rings. (Consider curling a distant cousin of shuffleboard.) Two teams, each with four players, take turns sliding the stones — also called “rocks” —toward the target. Each team has eight stones per end, which is curling's version of, say, a baseball inning. There are 10 ends in a tournament-style game.

Need a visual? Here are the ice dimensions from the World Curling Federation.

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The stone weighs 38 to 44 pounds. Players use brooms to smooth the ice and ease the stone’s path toward the house. If a player breaks a rule — like nudging the stone with their shoe — they should be “the first to divulge the breach,” according to the WCF. This sportsmanship expectation is part of what players call “the spirit of curling.”

[ Related: Rules of curling in the Winter Olympics ]

Scoring

The objective is simple: The team that lands the most stones closest to the bulls-eye wins.

Players win a point for every stone that 1) lands in the house and 2) is closer to the “button” — or center of the house — than the closest opponent stone. (For example, if Team A has the closest stone and Team B has the second closest stone, Team A can only earn one point, even if the rest of Team B's stones somehow ended up outside of the curling arena.) Teams can knock an opponent’s stone away from the house — and, through some vigorous sweeping, strategically place some stones as makeshift shields (guards) to protect others.



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