How Curling Ice Made for the Olympics in Beijing

BEIJING – Ice can only look like ice.

But not in curling.

Created for elite competitions like the Olympics, frozen sheets are the product of a painstaking process led by a team of specialists who fit specific demands to ensure that a heavy stone glides gracefully down a track, backed by the furious sweep of a broom. .

Even in the best of conditions, work in sports facilities is stressful. In Beijing, it was another story entirely.

The world’s experts in creating ice worthy of Olympic-class curling are faced with a task more daunting than anything they’ve ever faced: transform an Olympic-size swimming pool at the National Aquatics Center into ice lanes ready for the world’s best curlers.

“It has never been done before,” said Hans R. Wuthrich, chief ice technician at the Beijing Games, his fourth Olympics, and just one of many outstanding competitions in his decades-long career.

Chinese officials boast Beijing’s status as the only city to host both the Summer and Winter Games – an achievement achieved in part by recycling venues built for the 2008 Olympics.

Curling events are held in the honeycomb exterior natatorium known as the Water Cube in 2008, where Michael Phelps won eight gold medals for the United States. Re-christened Ice Cube for the Winter Games. But preparing it was not as easy as changing its name.

The first challenge was building the infrastructure to hold the ice. The pool was filled with a metal scaffolding system covered with a layer of concrete.

Then it came to making the ice—and an early hurdle: The cube’s tap water had a total dissolved solid reading of 375 parts per million, such as salts, minerals, and ions. This amount is acceptable for drinking water, but not good enough to freeze and curdle anyway. Pollution affects the ability to make sheets as flat as possible.

The team used filtration systems to clean the water. But when they were made, they were too pure for human consumption.

“If you really drank it, it would burn you inside,” said Mark Callan, assistant ice technician in charge of curling competitions.

Outside, the water freezes from top to bottom, creating a wildly inconsistent surface. Inside, “you have to go very slowly,” Callan said, “let him freeze the water from the bottom up.”

When the top layers are frozen, white paint, logos and other markings are added. In total, the ice is 10 centimeters, or about four inches thick.

The next obstacle was the weather. The building was very dry – “that’s kind of ironic,” Callan said, “that we’re in the swimming pool.”

The team installed a humidifier system that emitted a continuous mist around the ice. That still wasn’t enough. Wuthrich was proud of the solution: filling a smaller pool with hot water not far from the ice. “Everyone thinks we’re absolutely crazy,” he said. In a post on Twitteralong with a photo showing it.

Even after the ice is frozen to its properties, technicians continue to fiddle with the details, monitoring the ice and the atmosphere around it on a granular level: too hot, too cold, too much moisture, too little moisture, not enough texture for the stone to slide into. Any deviation can have a huge impact on competition.

“We’re working with precision to a thousandth of an inch,” Wuthrich said after his team finished off the ice for a series of women’s games.

Certainty contradicts the notion that curling is easy when it comes to Olympic sports. Sport is widely accessible, and in amateur clubs, participants go out for a beer and have a good time.

But at the Olympic level, it is driven by athleticism and strategy, and the ability to read and know the ice is key to winning. It’s as much about ice as brooms and stones.

“This isn’t a game of chance, it’s a game of skill,” Callan said. “So, if you can’t provide consistent conditions, you start to negate the skill level and it becomes more of a game of chance – and it’s our job to make sure that’s not the case.”

Wuthrich and Callan – along with a third ice technician, Shawn Olesen – were drawn to this niche career with a passion for curling. They have day jobs. Wuthrich, who lives in Manitoba, owns a landscaping company and nursery; Based in Glasgow, Scotland, Callan is the sales director for the company that makes granite from an island off the coast of Scotland and the stones used in elite curling events.

As much as they find the job satisfying, they also accept the pressure that comes with it.

“This is the pinnacle of everything and it’s the same thing as an icemaker,” Wuthrich said of the Olympics. “You always have to be on the alert. If something small happens, you need to fix it. You have to do it the best possible way because people have struggled for 20 years to achieve this event.”

The night before the last game of the day, the three technicians – along with a team of about two dozen Chinese volunteers, mostly college students – went through their ice preparation routines.

The crew used an ice scraper to level the lanes. Callan wore a backpack with a can of water and a sprayer that looked like a shower head. Working backwards in the lanes, he sprayed water droplets to create the texture that allowed the stones to move and rotate across the flat surface.

They then came up with a mechanism called a rock mover that allowed them to rake a series of curved stones across the ice to simulate the game. They want the ice to be broken for the players.

In the final step, Callan came out with a single stone and put it to the test. Under the terms of their contract, they are required to provide ice with which a stone can move four to five feet in 24 to 25 seconds. They aim to keep the ice’s surface temperature at roughly 23 degrees Fahrenheit.

The days are long and getting longer. They arrived in Beijing a month ago and there was more than a dozen days of competition going up to three matches a day. Wuthrich walks about 10 kilometers a day at work; Callan goes 12 kilometers in because he’s the one doing the tissue hammering.

They start at 6 every morning. the problems kept creeping upso they usually work until 1 am

On Monday night, as the South Korean women’s team worked for a 5-point lead over Japan, Wuthrich slid off the ice and sat back for a moment. She imagined herself in her Manitoba home with two black Labrador retrievers nestled on either side of her. She savored the thought, she but returned to where the curling irons were strategizing and shouting in deep competition.

His eyes were ice.