Russia Wins First Medal In Olympic Curling
Russia’s curling team team – I’m sorry, “The Olympic Athletes from Russia” – competing at the PyeongChang 2018 Winter Olympics has officially made it acceptable to watch another event you never really understood or cared about previously.
All those dastardly Ruskies had to do was make sure they put pretty 20-something Anastasia Bryzgalova on their team, and the legions of thirsty beta males on Twitter did the rest. Some guys online are comparing her to a much younger Angelina Jolie or a healthier-looking Megan Fox, but I’m not seeing the connection (she’s better looking than either, for my money).
If you think about it, luring viewer interest in curling with some prime Slavic beauty is actually a pretty brilliant strategic move on the part of the disgraced Russian Olympic leadership. Having pulled off a coup like making curling relevant overnight, it’s no wonder the mad geniuses at the Kremlin managed to rig the 2016 US presidential election. Still, having done the former two seemingly impossible feats makes it all the more perplexing that they somehow got busted for trying to dope their athletes when Russia hosted the last edition of the Winter Olympics.
But back to PyeongChang. This is the first year that mixed doubles curling has been on the official Winter Olympics docket, and the so-called OAR team has already secured Mother Russia’s first medal in any curling event. Bryzgalova was instrumental in that Feb. 13 effort, demonstrating her poise (despite falling hard enough to sympathetic “owws” from the audience) patience and teamwork, helping her husband Alexander Krushelnitskiy (sorry, soyboys on social media, your latest unrequited love interest is already taken) get an 8-4 win over Norway. The OAR team was beaten out for gold and silver by Canada and Switzerland, respectively.
Let OlympicBettingOdds.com be realistic for a second: almost nobody in the general population has figured out what curling is, much less why they should care about it. For most folks watching the sport (Game? Activity? Whatever), curling is like some kind of extremely bizarre gene splice experiment gone awry. Looking for all the world like one part household chores, one part slip-n-slide, one part shuffleboard, curling – whatever its merits and the skill involved in being successful