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Ice maker discusses creating
elite level curling surface. (VIDEO)
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Currently we're watching the
Men's World Curling championships. Hubby is an avid curling fan, as many of my readers know.
Hubby creates a matrix of teams, and records each win and loss. Not a bad hobby whilse recovering from ill health!
He videotapes most games across the pond, since there is a difficult time difference for us. Today's game was being aired at 7:00 a.m. and we had to hustle to get everyone fed, fetch the newspaper and grab our coffee!
Now, hubby's gotten to know the players on various teams. He has followed all the the winter tournaments, as well as the Olympic Curling. Canada is famous for its ice making, as well. They import our experts to create the ice. There is a trick to ice-making in China, since in Beijing the outside humidity complicates the ice conditions. There have been some strange mistakes made by our expert curlers, which they attribute to the horrible ice, and rightly so.

The Canadian ice-makers, Hans Wuthrich and Greg Ewasko, have prepared well. They arranged to buy and import some pure water. Unfortunately, they shipped the water in containers contaminated with petroleum. Is this corruption, or incompetence, or ignorance, or just what?
The contaminated water means the the ice in Beijing didn't freeze properly. In fact, TSN tells us, 2/3 of the ice isn't level, and it's not meeting the blades of the ice machines. There are low spots, and the stale pebble causes more friction, it curls a little sooner.
Hubby tells me that we will see the difference as the tournament advances in that the expert curlers, the ones with skill, talent and finesse, will not pull ahead as they should. The ice is unpredictable, and the skips cannot read the ice. Our amateur curlers have spent years perfecting these skills. Employers five them time off to do so. Other countries pay their curlers to do this full-time.
Sheet D is especially bad, they say, and really having an impact on the performance of the top teams.
Canadian media are so darned polite:
'
Nuances?'
In this video, Greg Ewashko talks about 4 days working around the clock to prepare the ice.
They pebble and scrape it with their machines. What a colossal waste of time, energy and money, as well as water!