A cheating claim violated the ‘spirit of curling’ at the Olympics, but the sport is moving on

CORTINA D’AMPEZZO, Italy — First came the expletives. Then the allegations. Then the media glare and hilarious memes.

Global interest in curling surged over the past week when a cheating controversy erupted at the Winter Olympics, rocking a staid, 500-year-old sport known for its etiquette, manners and friendliness.

After a wild few days for curling featuring plenty of verbal jousting and a brief rule change, things have calmed down and both players and officials appear ready to move on with the medal games approaching.

“It’s the Olympics,” said Canadian curler Ben Hebert, whose team has been a central character in the controversy. “It’ll be over in two weeks and everyone will go back to covering curling in four years.”

Yet the headline-grabbing saga has highlighted some issues in a sport eager for exposure – and one slowly becoming more professional — but maybe isn’t ready for all the trappings that come with it.

Sweden crying foul over a rule infringement, an illegal double-touch by Canada’s Marc Kennedy in the act of releasing his stone down the ice, called into question whether the so-called “spirit of curling” had been broken.

Curling, after all, has long been a tight-knit sport where players typically call their own fouls, shake hands at the end of a match and share a beer or two afterwards.

The Swedish and Canadian players have been long-time rivals but they’re also friendly. Couldn’t they just have dealt with this behind closed doors without all the bruising?

“That’s where I think the spirit of curling is in a little bit of trouble,” Kennedy said, “and honestly that’s probably come from the quest for medals. But it’s OK. It’s all about the evolution of the sport. There’s opportunity here as well, right? For the sport to really figure it out as we all go forward.”

It seems the top of the sport isn’t quite ready for that.

Inside the widening Olympic curling controversy and allegations of cheating

There are no video replays in curling, unlike with sports like soccer, cricket and in the NFL, so officials aren’t allowed to re-umpire decisions like the hog line violation apparently committed by Kennedy when he poked one of the granite stones with his outstretched finger after releasing it.

In response, curling’s higher-ups first stationed umpires at the hog line to check for future fouls, but then reverted to the traditional practice of players policing themselves.

“We’re trying to spread the word about our culture, and our culture is one based on integrity, and honor, and friendship,” World Curling President Beau Welling told The Associated Press in a phone interview. “We live by this code — the spirit of curling — where you’re expected to have honorable conduct on ice, but also off ice.

“Obviously, this has been tested a little bit this week. But, fundamentally, that’s who we are,” he said. “And I really don’t see that changing.”

Some might see this as sweeping the issue under curling’s rug.

Yet this is the Olympic Games — it’s serious business, being played out in front of curling’s biggest audience.

“Curling needs to professionalize a little bit,” Canada Curling CEO Nolan Thiessen told the AP at the Cortina Curling Center. “If we want to be where we want to be as a sport, there’s some steps we have to take, and some give and take probably. You know, having officials making subjective calls … there’s a lot of sports that have that. And we probably need to get there as opposed to, ‘I think you did this’ and ‘Well, I don’t think I did.’

“We’re trying,” he added, “to find the right balance as a sport.”

And so, the show goes on.

The Olympics soon will be without Sweden’s defending champion men’s team, which was officially eliminated from semifinal contention on Tuesday after a sixth loss in seven matches in round-robin play.

“We maybe should have done something different and could have dealt with it differently,” Sweden skip Niklas Edin said of what he described as a “horrible week.”

Plenty of curling traditionalists will no doubt agree with that.

AP Sports Writer Jimmy Golen and Associated Press writer Julia Frankel contributed to this story