The round-robin competition at the world women's curling championship had everything a fan could ask for.
Too bad nobody bothered to show up.
The marquee event on the women's curling calendar featured plenty of great shots and thrilling finishes, but was an enormous flop from an attendance standpoint. Through 14 draws Wednesday, only 34 tickets had been sold - 22 for the opening two draws alone. Thousands of tickets were given away to schools and businesses, but that didn't help bolster crowds that often lingered around 100 fans per draw.
Billed as a chance to introduce the sport to South Korea, the event drew gatherings so small that conversations between players could clearly be heard from every corner of the 3,500-seat Gangneung International Ice Rink.
"It's great to be here, because the country is nice and the people are nice," said Denmark's Madeleine Dupont. "But I would have loved to see more (fans)."
Naturally, games involving the host South Koreans drew the largest crowds - but even then, the majority of fans were local schoolchildren brought in for class trips. They were noisy during the playing of the national anthems, they cheered at bizarre times during the game and they were often out of the building before the eighth end.
Fans who did show up clearly had a lot to learn about curling etiquette - one group banged inflatable Thunderstix in delight every time a German player made a mistake against the South Korean team, skipped by Mi-Yeon Kim.
Big deal, nobody likes curling, right? That might be true, at least in Korea, but local authorities were trying to use this event to bolster their chances of attracting the 2018 Winter Olympics to Pyeongchang.
5 comments:
I wonder what the K-blog take would be on it if Korea had beaten the host country (say, Canada?) in the curling championship and then the Korean press had griped about fans in that host country.
"Sore winners" would be one of the first comments, I'm sure.
From what I recall, the same fan situation happened the last time a curling championship was hosted in Korea. To be fair, though, it was hosted in Jeju, so not exactly a lot of people are going to make that long trek to watch a game they know nothing about.
The Korean women's curling team has always been strong, at least in Asia, and don't embarrass themselves when they play the stronger Canadian and European teams.
I don't think sore winning or sore losing had anything to do with it. There's probably some pride there with curling associated with being Canada's sport, and so some disappointment at a lack of enthusiasm. No different than a Korean team going to a foreign country for a Tae Kwon Do contest---if they even have those---and then the press writing about a lack of knowledge and enthusiasm.
This wasn't so much the spectators' fault as the organizers' for not educating them. If they knew it wasn't like the WBC, they probably wouldn't have treated it that way.
Which is worse: Koreans being poor losers or Koreans being poor winners?
"one group banged inflatable Thunderstix in delight every time a German player made a mistake against the South Korean team"
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