THE ICEMAN COMETH
ATB Centre ready for world curling championships
Converting hockey ice to curling ice is an involved process. The ice surface needs to be perfectly level for one thing — something hockey players are less concerned with.
“Hockey ice, from the way they scrape, is never level,” said Jamie Bourassa.
He should know. Bourassa is the chief ice technician responsible for transforming the hockey ice surface to curling ice at the ATB Centre for the 2017 World Mixed Doubles and Seniors Championships that begin today.
“We need absolute flat,” he said.
Bourassa has been making curling ice for more than 40 years. He comes by his work as the world’s premier curling ice maker honestly — his dad was the recreation director for Fort Macleod, where Bourassa grew up.
“He looked after the rink, and the curling rink, and the pool, so I’ve always been around recreation,” he said.
Bourassa eventually turned his attention to making curling ice, and now spends his days making sure the ice is perfect for some of the world’s largest curling tournaments. His career has taken him to China, Japan, Russia, Germany, Sweden and many other parts of the world, as his services are highly sought after.
When asked about what makes the perfect curling ice surface, Bourassa pointed to the players themselves.
“The perfect ice, I would say, is ice that the players feel comfortable on and make lots of shots,” he said. “Everyone has a little different idea about what they think is perfect. If they aren’t yelling at us, then we’re good.”
Level ice is vital to curling, and it is the first thing Bourassa and his crew do when they begin converting hockey ice to curling ice.
Once the ice is levelled, it is painted white to cover the hockey markings. The crew then marks out all the dividers and walkways, measures out centre pins, and paints the rings.
Bourassa said every building is different, and that it can take days to transform the ice for a curling event. One issue they often deal with is getting the air flow just right.
“We have to work with the building to get the air right, and make sure the air flow doesn’t hit the ice,” he said.
The setup at the ATB Centre will benefit from the Plexiglas being kept in, which acts to redirect airflow away from the ice.
“A lot of the events I go to, we take the glass right out,” Bourassa said. “And hockey rinks are designed for the air to blow across the fans, and then the glass stops it. As soon as we take out the glass, it comes out onto the ice area.”
One benefit to being in a brand new facility like the ATB Centre is that the floor is fairly level.
“We don’t have to carry as much ice to get level, so that’s a nice thing,” he said.
“With curling ice, if you have any discrepancy in height, the rock will notice that,” he said. “It’ll fall off a line or curl more than it does anywhere else. We have to be flat across the surface.”
Pebble – or ice bead – is added by spraying the surface with freezing water. The beads reduce surface tension on the stones and allow them to travel smoothly over the surface.
“If it was just a flat surface, the rocks wouldn’t travel on that,” Bourassa said. “They’d just slide into the sides.”
Mike Mulroy, president of the Lethbridge Curling Club and cochair for the organizing committee in charge of the Worlds events, said preparations for the event began 18 months ago. The difference between this event and other world events is size.
“Typically, you are dealing with about 12 teams of competitors, with up to 56 actual athletes, and then officials and others,” he said. “Our competitors and coaches are going to number somewhere close to 380.
“And then you add officials, and delegates, and everything on top of that. We’re probably going to be handing out 900 credentials when all is said and done. We’ve got 13 sheets of ice, and nine draws a day for nine days. It’s basically two events.”
While the World Mixed Doubles and World Seniors events have been held together for a number of years, the inclusion of mixed double in the upcoming 2018 Olympics may change how the two events are handled in the future.
The event represents an opportunity for the City to show off the ATB Centre on a world stage, and to show the city can handle large-scale events of this calibre – which could lead to more opportunities.
“The venue, when we started looking at it, is exactly what we needed,” Mulroy said. “But having said that, moving in here, there was a lot of stuff we didn’t know, which has been a challenge.
“Our hope is, if we pull this off properly, we can prove this facility can handle more things like this. I think this is going to be huge for Lethbridge,” he said.
In the meantime, the world’s greatest curling ice maker continues his work. If nothing else, the players will be throwing and sweeping and scoring on the very best ice possible for world-class curling competition. Bourassa said even after 40 years, he still gets nervous when curlers take to the ice for the first time.
“You always get a little anxious before it starts,” he said. ‘But once it gets going, things are usually pretty good.”
The 2017 World Mixed Doubles and Seniors Championships get going on today at the ATB Centre.
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