WANT TO TRY CURLING? GET READY FOR A 100-MILE TRIP

We have heard a lot about inspiration in recent weeks. Great Britain’s winter Olympians have inspired the nation again; the medals are worth every penny of the millions invested because these feats move us all. Yet when Lizzy Yarnold and the four bronze medallists returned from Pyeongchang this week, the welcome party contained family and friends. Not the crowds that lined the streets after the 2012 London Games. Winter Olympians do not inspire because their sports are niche and inaccessible. Try skeleton? You can’t. There isn’t an ice track in the country. Winter conditions are a massive inconvenience here, not part of life as occurs in Norway. When it snows here it dominates the front pages of newspapers for days on end. That doesn’t happen in Oslo. Strangely, ‘It’s snowing’ isn’t big news for Aftenposten. Over here, there’s been snow for two days, Lincolnshire have called in the military and we’re about to run out of gas. This isn’t a winter sports nation. as someone paid by the public purse, Sir hugh Robertson, head of the British Olympic association, takes a rather different view. Justifying the £32m spent on winter sports, he made a connection between success and future participation. ‘It’s a direct cause and effect link,’ he said. ‘The sport where you can most clearly see this is hockey. It’s the classic example — the women win gold in Rio de Janeiro and girls are flooding into women’s hockey clubs.’ Well, of course they are. hockey clubs exist. You can type in your postcode on the england hockey website and a list will appear of clubs in your locality. I’ve got five within 5.7 miles of my house and the nearest is 1.8 miles away. also, girls play hockey at school so the potential to grow women’s hockey participation simply needed an inspirational trigger. Now: try curling. That’s the name of the website encouraging curling participation: www.trycurling.com. So I did. I typed in my postcode, just like the hockey. and the nearest rink was 38 miles away, in Kent. after that, 168 miles away in Deeside. Beyond that, Lockerbie, 279 miles away. Trying other random addresses, I discovered the nearest rink to Norwich was 112 miles, to hull 115 miles, to exeter 170 miles. here’s the reality: there are two British curling rinks outside Scotland. One is in Tunbridge Wells, the other in Queensferry, Wales. So trying curling is nonsense, no matter how inspired you may feel by eve Muirhead (above). If you pick up a new sport, you go local. No one signs up to a 340-mile round trip from Devon on the off-chance they will catch the curling bug. It is utterly disingenuous to compare winter sports to hockey, in terms of the potential for participation. We buy Winter Olympic medals because it makes us look good as a country. We buy medals for the same reason that east Germany did: for national prestige. If you want to inspire at a basic level, you take the bulk of that £32m and sink it into better facilities for populist sports. all-weather pitches, ball courts. Winter sports are our indulgence, and no more. Put it like this: the reason elise Christie is uncertain of switching from short track speed skating to the considerably less messy longer form of her sport is that, if she does, we do not have a single facility in the country capable of supporting her. and if they haven’t got it for her, what do you think they’ve got for you?