I Don’t Know If You Know This: But Our Olympic Curlers Are National Heroes

GANGNEUNG, South Korea — John Shuster, the face of American curling for the past four Winter Olympics — and all the good and bad those experiences have entailed — had a gold medal draped around his neck for the first time in his life on Saturday.

Moments before, he and his teammates had done what jubilant curlers do: They raised their brooms aloft in screaming excitement over an improbable victory. Yet at that moment, it was hard to believe how close his dream had come to crumbling apart.

Last Sunday, after a loss to Norway, the Americans were on the brink of elimination, again.

After that game, with family headed to a hotel and his wife’s encouraging words ringing in his head, Shuster, 35, found a grassy spot outside the venue, sat down and came to a realization.

“This is silly,” he told himself. “I’m getting my heart broken, I feel like, by this sport — and this is silly. Seriously, this is the Olympics.”

He slept soundly that night for the first time in a long time. His team did not lose again.

Full NY Times Article here.

The United States did not do so hot in this Olympics. I mean we did fine, we’re just not dominating in the traditional American way. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t fucking matter at all, and I’ll tell you why. Our Olympic Curling Team is full of the only heroes you need. Forget Shaun White, forget the women’s hockey team, this is the only gold we needed. This gold medal should count as forty-five. This the best Olympic victory since we smoked Russia in 1980: instead of a team full of college kids, we’ve got a squad of beer-gutted, McDonald’s loving, small town fellas just pursuing the sport they love.

If you didn’t read the article above, which you should have, here’s the gist: these guys were never supposed to even come close to winning the gold. These guys weren’t even supposed to be on the goddamn podium. The team captain, John Shuster, fucked up at the last Olympics so badly that his name got the urban dictionary treatment - which, by the way, is rock bottom. He got cut from the squad, and eventually returned to the arena with a new team known as the “The Rejects”- a team full of guys out of Minnesota and Wisconsin on the margins of the sport, and fought their way back into a spot for Olympic contention.

They found themselves first on the brink of elimination in the early rounds, and then didn’t lose a fucking game. I don’t have a fucking clue how curling works. I mean I know it happens on ice, you’ve got folks with brooms, and I’m pretty sure I’d faceplant and knock out all of my teeth if I tried it. I know that the USA was never supposed to beat Canada and Sweden, two titans of Olympic Curling who basically fuck on whoever they please. So, in case I didn’t set the stage clearly enough, this IS USA vs. Russia in 1980. All of the odds were set against them, and I don’t know whether it was all the sales experience out of a sporting goods store in Duluth, Minnesota, the celebratory McFlurry’s (link here) after knocking out Canada and moving to the gold medal round, or the glorious mustache of Matt Hamilton, but these small-town boys found a way to pull out the seemingly least-probable victory in curling history.

We may suck at everything else except for half-pipe (fuck you Shaun White), some other type of snowboarding (that girl who tweets and seems great), and women’s ice hockey (they’re actually very sick), but I’d take champions like these over highest medal-count any day.

P.S. I guess being dope at curling doesn’t get you free seats on Delta, huh. Nobody said these guys were in it for the glory.