A CULTURE SHIFT NEEDED
Why does it matter that a Canadian curling team was removed from a competition for intoxication and bad behaviour? Jamie Koe, Ryan Fry, Chris Schille, and DJ Kidby were kicked out of the Red Deer Curling Classic in Alberta on Sunday afternoon. The Classic is a stop on the internationally respected World Curling Tour.
This was a team made of elite members of the sport in Canada. Fry was a member of the Team Canada rink that captured a gold medal in Sochi in 2014.
“They went out to curl and they were extremely drunk and breaking brooms and swearing, and just unacceptable behaviour that nobody wants to watch or hear or listen to, and it was just ‘enough was enough,’ ” facility manager Wade Thurber told CBC Sports.
Thurber said there was also inappropriate behaviour in the dressing room.
“So at the end of the day, it was like ‘OK, that’s enough of this gong show,’ ” Thurber said.
Perhaps it is also time to end the culture that often puts excessive drinking hand-in-hand with sport on too many levels. All over Canada, curling rinks almost always contain a bar, and a post-game round — or a few — is part of the ritual in many clubs. It’s not just curling, however; ball tournaments almost always have a beer garden, and booze makes regular appearances in recreational hockey locker rooms.
Where there is a lot of drinking, there is a lack of judgment. As we know all too well in Saskatchewan, there is also a tendency to drink and drive. Saskatchewan has the highest impaired driving rates in the country. The provincial government has initiated tough new laws and increased preventative measures. There have been improvements, but 39 people still died due to drinking and driving in the province in 2017.
Nobody sets out to play a sport with friends, to just blow off some steam and maybe have a few drinks, and also intends that the night will end with obnoxious behaviour and a drunken drive home. But we know it happens. Apparently heavy drinking is still so mixed with a sport like curling that the best athletes in the world can wind up embarrassing themselves on the world stage.
Painting all athletes in curling and similar sports with the same brush — as drinkers, as irresponsible — would be inaccurate and unfair.
Responsible adult behaviour is not in question. But it is time to say enough of the “gong shows” that pop up around sport on an all-tooregular basis. Perhaps some good can come from Fry and company’s humiliation, if this acts as a wake-up call for others.