Curl Runnings
Dream of a Jamaican curling team draws closer
Markham resident Ben Kong was serious when he first started talking about a national curling team for Jamaica.
The problem was that no one took him seriously.
“I tried to look for other Jamaican curlers,” says Kong, who was born there. “Even in the Greater Toronto Area they were quite scarce. And the few that did (curl) didn’t take me seriously. They’re like, ‘Right, you’re going to put a Jamaican curling team together? Uh-huh.’ ”
But the pandemic, and the urge to do something constructive during it, pushed him to realize his dream. Kong used his own money to found the Jamaica Curling Federation in October 2020 and has now applied to become a member of the Jamaica Olympic Association, as well as part of the World Curling Federation.
“Once the Jamaica Olympic Association formally admits us as members and it approves us, then we become full members of the World Curling Federation as well,” says Kong, president of the Jamaican federation called Curling Jamaica.
“And then we’re eligible to enter into world championship qualifiers and earn points toward the Olympics.”
If admitted — they hope to find out by summer — the curlers could potentially follow in the footsteps of the Jamaican bobsled team made famous in the movie “Cool Runnings,” which made its debut at the Calgary Games in 1988.
“I have the utmost respect for them,” Kong says of the four-man team of Dudley (Tal) Stokes, Michael White, Devon Harris and Chris Stokes. “They basically paved the way for this to be possible. And now if we announce that we’re going to be competing as a team in Jamaica on the world stage, I don’t believe it’s going to be a novelty anymore because the bobsled team already blazed that trail for us.”
The bobsled team became wildly popular, despite finishing last. In an interview last year with Olympics.com, Stokes said it took him a while to understand why until he realized the team represented “an idea that regardless of where you’re from or your circumstances or who your parents were, you can move yourself into other places, you can make more of yourself.”
However, unlike the bobsledders who were complete neophytes to the sport, there are at least some experienced curlers who could compete for Jamaica.
One of them is Cristiene Hall-Teravainen, a competitive senior curler out of Thunder Bay, who has agreed to skip the team along with vice Stephanie Chen, who attends Laurier University in Waterloo and plays for the Golden Hawks varsity curling team. (Her brother, Justin Chen, has curled for Hong Kong. Their mother is Jamaican.)
Hall-Teravainen, who was born in Jamaica, says she was definitely one of the skeptics when she first heard from Kong. It took her a year to respond after disregarding his initial message through Facebook, suspicious that it wasn’t really about curling.
But when a coach suggested that