Why Curling is Such a Rugged Sport

Norway’s curling team has wild pants for Winter Olympics

By Cindy Boren, Washington Post

January 22 at 9:03 am

Luckily, curling isn’t a sport with a lot of fast, violent movement.

The Norwegian curling team has outdone itself with its latest duds for next month’s Winter Olympics in Sochi. Norway’s team has become known for its pants and even has an unofficial Facebook page (The Norway Olympic Curling Team’s pants, natch, with well over 500,000 likes).

Encore, for the Norwegian Curlers and Their Pants

By MARY PILON, The New York Times

JAN. 21, 2014

The curlers have gotten used to people paying attention to their clothes. In 2010, at the Vancouver Games, where the Norwegians won a silver medal, they made a splash when they made the sheet of curling ice their runway, competing in pants of bright red, white and blue, the colors of their country’s flag.

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Representatives of Loudmouth, the company in Foster City, Calif., that made the pants, said orders out of London went up tenfold, and the company’s servers crashed.

“It was enough to cause a stir in the curling world,” said Tony D’Orazio, a curler in Rochester, N.Y., who started the fan page and has chronicled the team’s fashion for the last four years. “For them to do what they did in 2010, it was revolutionary to curling. It took the traditions of the sport and re-energized it for a new generation.”

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“These pants would be great to win in,” Vad Petersson said. “But they’d be terrible to lose in. We decided that when we wear them, we have to really try and win and go the whole way.”