Don’t snicker until you’ve tried curling

It’s the safest bet at any Winter Olympics. Curling will win the gold medal for audience snickering.

Please, don’t knock it until you’ve curled it.

I discovered that last weekend at the Orlando Curling Club’s Learn 2 Curl seminar. The key moment came about five minutes in.

“This is the athletic part,” said Jim, the helpful instructor. Athletic part?

Isn’t there some sports law prohibiting the terms “athletic” and “curling” from appearing in the same sentence?

That’s the kind of snootiness curling must bear. Most people south of the Canadian border consider it an excuse to drink, not a sport.

My definition is that if you can smoke while doing it, it’s just a game. And in the most famous curling event ever, the Beatles were in a marijuana haze.

In the madcap movie Help, a spy plants a bomb in a curling stone. George yells, “It’s a fiendish thingy!” and tells everyone to run.

Years later, Ringo recounted that he and Paul ran off the set and smoked a joint.

“That helped make it a lot of fun,” he said.

I did not get high before Learn 2 Curl. Good thing, because it demanded far more physical and mental skill than I expected.

“It’s like chess on ice,” Brian Pittard said.

The West Palm Beach, Fla., native fell for the sport after seeing it in the 2010 Winter Olympics. He started the Orlando Curling Club four years ago, and there have been challenges.

One of the biggest is simply finding ice time. The club alternates between Daytona and the RDV Sportsplex, where it booked the 10 p.m.-1 a.m. slot Saturday night.

About 30 people showed up. I’m not saying anyone smoked weed in the parking lot, but a few of them toppled over when we got to the “athletic part.”

You have to push off from a small backstop, slide into a deep lunge, balance your weight on one foot, glide down the ice and gently aim a 42-pound piece of granite down a 150-foot journey to a target.

My first stone made it about 43 feet.

So much for my snootiness. It also takes great athleticism to not go deaf. The team leader yells “SWEEP!” as two people furiously whisk the path in front of the stone to make it go farther and straighter.

The mental part requires ignoring your cold feet, calibrating ice resistance and plotting strategy with teammates so the stone will curl to the right spot.

It’s apparently much easier to do if you’re from Canada, which dominates Olympic curling. The U.S. is on par with Tahiti, but we’re slowly discovering curling’s charms.

One of the biggest cheerleaders in Pyeongchang is Washington Redskins tight end Vernon Davis, who’s been curling since 2009.

“I feel like athletes in general, especially football and basketball players in particular, would love the sport if they knew more about it,” he told The Washington Post.

Curling’s finest practitioners are certainly easier to relate to than the average sports superstar. The U.S. women’s team is made up of a nurse, a pharmacist, an insurance salesman and a lady who works at Dick’s Sporting Goods.

It’s true that anyone can curl. But not just anyone can do it well.

“I found the strategy of it very interesting,” Max Van Arsdale said.

He and his wife, Vanessa, drove from Jacksonville, Fla., for Saturday night’s session. They drove back ready to spread the curling gospel. “It was a lot of fun,” Vanessa said. If you think she was just high, I suggest watching a game on TV this week and checking out the Orlando Curling Club’s website (curlingorlando.com) for information about the next seminar.

Then show up with a pair of warm socks. You’ll never laugh at curling again.