How curling came to be in Hokkaido

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 18/03/2015 (4036 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

SAPPORO, Japan — When curling first came to Hokkaido, there were few pebbled sheets, no curling centres like the one now sprung in Sapporo’s southeast corner.

Back then, Kuniyasu Tada remembered, he and his friends sometimes tried to roar their rocks across parking lots, or spritz water onto ice at the park.

So the games were chilly, the sheets were rough. There were “many accidents” when they played, Tada laughed, as he told his story through an interpreter. Then again, the unpredictable ice had an upside too — equalization.

“Sometimes if it was not good team, we had a great opportunity to win.”

It helped that they were all just learning then, taking the sport that a Canadian man they called “Wally-san” had brought them, and making it their own.

That was about 30 years ago. Now, some of the best curlers in the world are in Sapporo, with the 2015 Women’s World Curling Championship well underway. The fifth day of round-robin play opened at Tsukisamu Gymnasium on Wednesday, with another win for Team Canada’s Jennifer Jones, a 9-3 cruise over winless Norway.

At any curling tournament back home, her game might have been the highlight.

Here, a few hundred fans applauded politely, then turned their attention back to the sheet where Hokkaido’s own Ayumi Ogasawara was fighting for a 7-4 win over Denmark’s Lene Nielsen. A hundred rising suns fluttered in the stands.

The morning was white-bright in Sapporo, and relatively dry, though the humid air that hovers in the 43-year-old arena tends to frost the ice. The curlers have been wrangling with that all week. “It seems much better now, and we have a way better handle on it, so we’re making a lot more shots,” Jones said.

Other than that, Jones raved, the hospitality has been top-notch.

Around the arena, which was built to house hockey games at the 1972 Winter Olympics, the same was true: the soundtrack of the concourse is a chorus of “good mornings,” a greeting most everyone delivers upon spotting a non-Japanese visitor.

This is a proud moment for them, to once again bring the world to Sapporo, the kind of pride the city has built into a brand.

The place blossomed after the ’72 Olympics, energized by the investment and the adventure. “We created an Olympics that were good for Sapporo, so that Sapporo could be improved,” said Yoshihiro Ishikawa, a sports planning manager with the city and co-organizer of these women’s worlds.

Those Olympics also paved the way for curling to make its way into Hokkaido.

Oh, the sport itself wasn’t in the Games back then. Here’s what happened: No doubt drawn by the Olympic glow, Alberta sent an economic mission to Hokkaido in 1971. Within a decade, the two regions had signed a formal “sister province” agreement.

As part of that relationship, Alberta dispatched Wally Ursuliak, the lead for Hec Gervais’ 1961 Brier-winning Alberta team, to schlep around the island and teach classes.

A newspaper article in Hokkaido suggested learning curling might be the quickest way for a non-athlete to become an Olympian, since so few people played. That was good enough to lure Tada to the very first class that “Wally-san” taught in Sapporo. And though the facilities were rough, and the game all but unknown, Tada — now a manager with the Sapporo Curling Association — fell in love.

“So many people at the same level, they were all beginners,” he said. “Sometimes we won, sometimes we lose. But I felt the possibility. It was a team sport, teamwork and communication very important… so I thought it was a very good thing. And it is really fun to play.”

So that’s how curling came to Hokkaido, and raising it up has been a labour of love. There are about 400 people who curl in Sapporo, a number which rose quickly after they built a new curling stadium here a few years ago. And maybe someday, Kuniyasu dreams, there will someday be an Olympic curling champion from Hokkaido. And why not? They’ve already come this far.

“First we are players and having fun,” he said. “After that we are involved in the curling federation. Then we have the new curling stadium in Sapporo, and that was one of our dreams… and after that now we have the championships, and we are really, really happy about that.”

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca