I know a lot of Americans feel a little guilty right now about Canada, the fact that we seem to have taken a particularly antagonistic tenor toward our northern neighbor. Things like 100% tariffs, and threatening to close an international bridge, and this whole thing about annexing the entire country as the 51st state. That kind of stuff. And especially since a lot of us in the Northern U.S. think of Canadians as our nicer and sometimes funnier neighbors, a foreign country you can drive to with cool cities that sometimes still take American dollars and have awesome doughnuts, we’re somewhere between ashamed and apologetic about our northern exposure.
Americans, repent no more, as you can now feel justifiable anger toward those Canucks, hopefully giving you some solace that perhaps America’s not the only bad guy here. That relief is all thanks to none other than the Canadian Olympic Curling Team, which finds itself amidst the most notable scandal in the sport since Broomgate in 2015, and yes, I had to look that up. If you haven’t heard, both the men’s and women’s Canadian curling teams are embroiled in controversy, earning the ire of their Olympic competitors and perhaps even spawning feelings of shame back on the prairie. Both teams were accused of what’s called double tapping, which is when the thrower touches the curling stone after it’s crossed a particular line, after which only momentum and brushing are to keep this thing going.
It began on Friday when Swedish curler Oskar Eriksson accused Canadian curler Marc Kennedy of a double tap, which caused a heated argument that momentarily made the sport look more like hockey than shuffleboard. Then the next day Canadian Rachel Homan was penalized for a double tap in Canada's match against Switzerland, and Canada subsequently lost the match 8-7. And no, I still don’t understand how scoring works.
Both Canadian athletes vehemently refute the accusations. And even though the Canadian women are barely hanging on, both teams remain in medal contention, hoping to keep their status as one of if not the dominant curling nation on the planet. This is all great news for NBC, who have to keep feeding the beast of esoteric sporting story lines now that the ski jumping crotchgate saga has receded, especially if they’re going to keep making us tune in for sports we otherwise would never watch in a million years if they weren’t at the Olympics.
Not that it likely matters that much, but it sounds like whatever extra tap may or may not have happened likely had little impact on where the stone actually ended up, at least according to experts who talk about curling. I can neither confirm nor deny this any more than I can speak to whether all that illegal extra fabric in skiers pants actually made them more aerodynamic. To some extent, I’m fairly certain that’s not even the point, at least in comparison to the relative outrage it caused. And to be clear, no sane person seems to be suggesting that Marc Kennedy’s late finger brush of the stone was somehow analogous to someone taking steroids or putting a mini-engine in the back wheel of their bicycle, which is something that has actually happened in pro cycling.
I think the issue here, and really with all sports, is oddly far less about outcome and far more about intention. The reality is, most sports – especially some of these Winter Olympic Sports that feel more like drunken challenges made one snowy night on top of a mountain – are built around a code of ethics, some universal creed that separates international sport from some athletic house of cards, where yes, the rules are built to ensure some competitive fairness and equity, but their observance and penance, even in the extreme, are far more tied to a sporting ethic than how it actually changes the results. Which as far as we can tell, neither double tap seemed to do. It’s why golfers end up having to forfeit a match they won because they forgot to sign a scorecard, which doesn’t change anything about the golfing itself, but, if you ask golfers, is the near equivalent of picking up your ball and throwing it.
So it’s not that the Canadians got some advantage. It’s that they didn’t play by the rules. They weren’t honest, if you will. And that, at least for a moment, can hopefully give us Americans a moment of mental respite.
Keith Strudler is the Dean of the College of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. You can follow him at @KeithStrudler.
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